Then again she seemed roaming through the woods.
"Hark," she would say, "hear how the birds sing, and see the gay flowers swing in the wind! Their mother doesn't die, and they have no aunts. O birdies! you don't know how cold Aunt Irene's lips are."
And Aunt Irene, listening, bent over the bed with tears blinding her eyes. Had her life been all a failure? she asked herself. She had tried to do her duty: was it all nothing, because she hadn't loved? Oh! if Agatha would but get well she would find some way to make her happy.
Before the crisis of the child's fever came, her father had arrived. The letter found him in Paris, and he had set out in twenty-four hours upon his homeward journey.
"Is she alive?" he asked, when his sister met him at the door, and started back, shocked by his haggard face.
"Yes, she lives, and the doctor says her fever must turn soon. Come and see her."
The little flushed face had never been so beautiful in its brightest days of health and joy, as now, with the clustering rings of hair framing in scarlet cheeks and large, strangely brilliant eyes. The father's heart almost broke as he stood there, unable to make her recognize his presence. While he watched, she said what she had said so often during the hours of that wasting sickness,—
"I have tried to be womanly and helpful. I think papa will want me after awhile. I hope so for Aunt Irene's lips are cold."
How keenly he reproached himself then for having left her, only God knew. He was a silent man, as I have said, and silently he shared Aunt Irene's vigil without even thinking of rest after his journey.