At last Nelly came again. It was a day in the late June, and she found me just where she had left me, under the old horse-chestnut tree in the great old-fashioned garden. I knew it must be almost time for her coming, but I had not asked any one about it. Somehow I couldn't. I very seldom even spoke her name in those days. So she stole upon me unawares, and the first I knew her arms were round me,—her warm, tender lips against my own,—and her sweet, unchanged voice cried,—
"O Sophie, this is good, this is coming home, indeed!"
I cried like a very child. Nell didn't quite understand that; but then she had not had, like me, a hard place in her heart, which needed happy tears to melt it away. I think, in spite of the tears, I was more glad of the meeting even than she. After a little while she said,—
"Come, I want you to go home with me now, and see Lill."
Will you believe that even then the old, bitter jealousy began to gnaw again at my heart? She had been with Lill almost a year; could she not be content to give me a single hour without her? Perhaps she saw my thought in my face; for she added, in such a sad, pitiful tone, "Poor Lill!"
"Poor Lill," indeed! with her beautiful golden hair, and her eyes like stars, and her lovely gowns, and her city airs, "poor Lill!"
"I should never think of calling Miss Simmonds poor," I said, with the old hardness back in my voice.
"You will when you see her, now," Nelly answered gently. "She had a hard fall on the icy pavement, last winter, and she hurt her hip, and it's been growing worse and worse. She can hardly walk at all, now, and she has suffered awfully. But she has been, oh so patient!"
And how I had dared to envy that girl! I was shocked and silenced. I walked along by Nelly's side very quietly. When we got there she took me up into her room, and there I saw Lill Simmonds. I should hardly have known her. The golden glory of hair floated about her still. The eyes were star-bright yet, but the cheeks which the long lashes shaded were pink no longer, and they were so thin and hollow that it was pitiful to see them.
She wore a wrapper of some soft blue stuff, and on her lap lay her frail, transparent hands. She started up to meet us with a smile which for a moment gave back some of the old brightness to her face, but which faded almost instantly. I sat down beside the lounging-chair where she was lying, but I could not talk to her. The sight of her wasted loveliness was all too sad. After a little while she said to Nelly,—