In dumb despair Gertie listened to him with such pain in her heart as sisters never feel.
“I’ll do my best,” she said, and her white lips quivered, but she did not cry as she took her seat by Godfrey to watch him while he slept, and thought what life would be to her without him. “Godfrey dead, Godfrey dead,” she whispered, softly. “I should want to die, too. Oh, Godfrey, you are more than my brother, more than my brother.”
It was just as she said this that Miss Rossiter came in, and the sick man stirred upon his pillow as if about to waken. He must not wake. It was death to do so, and Gertie bent protectingly over him as a mother bends over her restless child, and until it was twice repeated she did not answer the astonished woman’s question, “Why are you here, and why call yourself his sister?”
Then she turned, and fixing her blue eyes steadily on the lady, she said, in a low whisper:
“Col. Schuyler is in Europe; there was no one else to come, and I am his sister; read that.”
She had the colonel’s letter in her pocket, where she kept it constantly, and she passed it to Miss Rossiter, who read it rapidly, and then, more surprised and bewildered than she had ever been in her life, began to question Gertie, who, of course, could offer no explanation.
“The thing is simply impossible. Colonel Schuyler was not in Europe nineteen years ago,” Miss Rossiter said, after a little mental calculation.
“Mother might have been in America,” was Gertie’s response, quietly and sadly spoken, and then Miss Rossiter began again to question her as to what she herself knew of her antecedents, or what she had heard from Mary Rogers.
The murmur of voices disturbed Godfrey, who moaned about the ship which would not be still. Then Gertie said to her companion:
“Miss Rossiter, you must not talk. If Godfrey gets well he must sleep; the doctor said so. He has fancied himself in a ship at sea, and endured all the agonies of sea-sickness. I have succeeded in making him believe he was on the land, but if the ship gets back into his head, he will die.”