The figure, still wrapped in the blanket, was at present sitting up, looking from one girl to the other in a quietly disinterested fashion.
“Oh, no, I am never worried over Peggy when she is attempting athletic feats,” he announced. “She will never do herself serious harm in that way. What I fear for her, what I know will hurt her some day, are the experiences about which she is so scornful at present. You see she is perfectly convinced that she will never care for any human being outside her family and a few friends. So nothing and no one can ever harm her.”
Billy Webster accepted the cup of tea and a comfortable number of sandwiches which Vera now offered him.
“Don’t be absurd, Billy,” Peggy challenged, her face reddening in spite of her effects to appear undisturbed. “As far as you are concerned you will look ever so much better as soon as you cease behaving like an invalid. I do believe you are in better health than you wish us to think you are.”
“Perhaps I am; really I don’t exactly know,” Billy returned dispassionately, as if he were speaking of some one else. He was holding his cup and gazing over its rim. “I do enjoy having so little asked of me. It has never happened before, as I have always been expected to do the things I dislike. Now, I would far rather be half ill than to have to shoot and fish and do the kind of things Dan and the other fellows out here like to do. Besides, I really tried to make myself ill, so that father would have to consent to my coming West.”
Billy made this announcement without embarrassment, but not as if he cared whether or not it were believed.
It was his sister, Peggy, who flushed uncomfortably as she always did over her brother’s oddities. To her truthful mind and straightforward nature his peculiarities were impossible to understand.
But Billy did not look as if his words had been altogether true. In spite of his sister’s speech, he was far more fragile than he had been when she had said farewell to him at their farm in New Hampshire a few months before. She had then started west to join her aunt, Mrs. Burton, and become a member of the Sunrise Hill Camp Fire club in Arizona.
At this instant and without being observed, Vera shook her head at Peggy.
If no one else understood Billy Webster’s vagaries, the Russian girl with whom he had so deep a friendship apparently did, or if not she usually had an excuse for him.