"Who?" Cora asked, but the girl's face went so white that again she pressed the tin cup to her lips.
"There," Cora went on, "we will talk of nothing now but of what we shall do to make you well again. Could you walk ever so little a distance? To my motor boat?"
"If I could, what then?" asked the girl.
"Then loving hands would bring back the color into your checks, and then the best boys in the world would come to help your father."
"Help father!" she repeated. "But that can never be done. Father is—an outcast!"
"But he has no disease," Cora said, remembering what Kate, had told her was Tony's excuse for going to see a victim of some dreadful disease, who was on Fern Island.
"No, thank God, his body is well, but his soul is sick—so very sick."
"Let me see if you can sit up?" asked Cora. "It will soon be night and we must try to get away."
"It will, be much better to leave him, and return, soon, well and strong enough to comfort him again," Cora said, "than to stay here, and perhaps die."
"You are right," said the stranger getting up on her elbow. "Oh, what it means to speak with a girl again. Heaven must have sent you."