"Oh, Mother Nature, I wish you were a relative of mine!" she used to cry, sometimes, with unconscious quaintness; but before the summer was over, leaning her head so much on the mosses, a sense of kinship began to thrill in her pulses, and before she knew it the pain in her heart was eased a little, and she began to think of her mother, not as buried up and hidden away from her, but as near to her and waiting for her.
Meantime she never forgot her father's words,—"Womanly and helpful,"—they were the keynote of her life. Aunt Irene wondered at her. She had thought her a mischievous little elf in the old days, but there was no mischief in her now. She herself respected no more religiously the rules of the household than did this little quiet child.
As for trouble, why the creature gave none,—she was learning to do every thing for herself. At last even Aunt Irene grew half frightened at this still patience, which she felt must be unnatural to childhood. She began to wish that she could hear Agatha laugh or shout,—that sometimes the child would tear her gowns, when she had on her oldest ones, at least,—that she would show some self-will, some little trace of her descent from apple-eating Adam of the old time.
She wrote to her brother how good and quiet his little girl was; but her heart misgave her. She did not know what more she could do to make her small inmate comfortable, but she had a vague sense that Agatha was living an unchildlike life, and was less happy than in the old days when the little girl and her mother came there together.
Mother Nature has her own methods of exacting compensation, and for Agatha's overstrained and unnatural life pay-day came in the autumn. It had grown too cold to lie with her ear on the mosses, listening to the earth's pulse-beats, and the child sat quietly within doors, until one day she turned very pale and rolled off her stiff, straight chair to the carpet, and Aunt Irene picked her up, a lighter weight now than in the spring-time, and carried her to her room.
Dr. Greene was sent for at once, and he looked at his little patient very gravely, and then whispered "typhoid" to her aunt.
Aunt Irene wrote a hurried line to Agatha's father, and then took up her post at the bedside, which for five weeks she scarcely left. She had a heart, only long ago she had concluded it was an inconvenience and locked it up; but now it broke loose from its confinement and half frightened her by its throbbings.
Her brother was very dear to her. She had loved him all his life, after the deep, silent, undemonstrative fashion of those who love but few; and now if this fresh grief was to come upon him how could she bear to see him suffer? But she did not allow these thoughts to interfere with her usefulness at Agatha's bedside. Day and night she watched over the child, who never once knew her, but who constantly mistook her for her mother, and clung to her passionately in the delirium of her fever.
"O mother!" she would say, "I thought I never, never should see you again. No one was cross to me, mamma darling; but no one loved me since you went away. I've been trying to grow womanly and helpful, so papa would be glad to have me with him by and by; but now you've come and you'll love me whether I'm good or not."