“No, indeed! I’ll stay here, happily, with a book and don’t you hurry! Get all the fun there is out of the child’s pleasure. I hope she will be pleased! I’m perfectly contented alone. Forget I’m here, but don’t forget to tell me just what the little girl does! It would be horrid in me to go up; she doesn’t know me,” Helen said with such friendliness that the Berkleys were charmed.
Kit followed Mrs. Berkley and Joan up to little Anne’s room and stood in the doorway. Little Anne was fingering paper dollies but her lack of interest in them was evident. She raised her eyes, which looked immense and as dark as night in her thin white face.
“Oh, Kit, my dear, dear, dear Kit! You saved me, but I loved you hard before!” she cried.
“Well, little Anne, I’m glad enough to see you to eat you up!” cried Kit, sincerely.
He lifted her in his arms and she kissed him again and again.
“You are more splendid than I remembered,” little Anne sighed in profound contentment. “Doctor says I may get up in my wrapper half the day Sunday. But he says I can’t go to Mass yet, but it’s all right when you can’t honest-truth go! And then, sooner than you’d think, I’m to be dressed! And by the Fourth you wouldn’t know anything’d happened, ’cept I’ve got to look out and not catch cold. That’s what he says. I’m grateful, Kit, that I’m going to stay right here with everyone! I know lots of people in Heaven, nicer’n anybody, but, well, don’t you think you love those you know sort of closer? And I’ll have to be just’s good! Because I stayed here. And prob’ly I’ve got something to do, or I’d have died.”
“Just the same, little Anne!” Kit thought, but he said:
“It’s reason enough for letting you live that we all wanted you so badly, little Anne. Now, what have I here?”
“Window in the end!” cried little Anne, all excitement in an instant. “Alive? Oh, could it be a kitten, Kit?”
“It could be. It is!” said Kit.