"Well, if you feel very, very glad and grateful for something, you can show your gratitude and your gladness through your hands."
"Oh, music!" said Mary, with sudden inspiration.
"No, it is something that everyone's hands can do. It is just making them do some little service as a thanksgiving. I am very, very glad, Mary, that your accident is no worse than it is, and I am very, very grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle and all of them, and to you too, Mary, for being so kind to me, but most of all I am grateful to God for sparing my life that day, and for sending Mr. Carlyle to me that day, and giving me such kind friends when I needed them so badly, and I feel I can never give thanks enough—except through my hands. So, the more I have to do the better I am pleased. Do you understand, Mary?"
"Yes, miss," said Mary huskily, and to Irene's surprise there were tears in her eyes. "I—I've often felt like that, miss, but I—never could say it, and I—I never met anyone else who did. But what about me, miss? I am sure I ought to be grateful for having you come to help me like this, yet I don't seem to be doing anything."
"But you will—you are always doing something, Mary. Now you can tell me where the things are kept—the soap and the dish-pan, and the dishcloth."
"And I can put the things away in their places," said Mary, somewhat comforted.
Audrey, after being banished from the kitchen, sat with her mother for a little while, but her thoughts were so pre-occupied, and she sat so long gazing abstractedly out of window, evidently hearing nothing that was said, that presently Mrs. Carlyle gave up trying to talk to her, and gradually fell asleep. Recalled to herself by the sound of the deep, regular breathing, Audrey rose, and tiptoeing softly from the room made her way swiftly to her beloved attic.
Faith, after a busy half-hour spent in mopping up water from the floor, and changing Joan's wet clothes, popped that young person into her cot to take her long-delayed nap, and laid her own weary body on her own little bed beside her.
"I must rest for just a few minutes," she sighed, "and then I will go down and see how Mary's hand is getting on." She picked up from the table beside the bed, the alluring book she was in the middle of.
It certainly was a very jolly story, perfectly fascinating, but somehow she could not get on with it. She read a few lines, and then the next thing she knew, she was finishing it off in her own brain. She tried again and the same thing happened, then at last when she was trying to read the end of the paragraph she had begun so many times, her eyelids dropped before she could even find it, the book slipped from her hand and fell forward on her face, and she had not the strength to hold it up again.