And while she slept, or seemed to, Jack freed his mind with regard to Georgie’s selfishness. It had always been so, he said. She had left to others what she ought to have done herself.
“Why, my mother, who was in no ways connected to Annie, did far more for her than Georgie, even when she lived at home,” he said, and then the great blue eyes opened wonderingly, and fixed themselves upon Jack’s face, while Annie said faintly:
“Your mother—not mine too,—Jack? Did you say that?”
Jack was in a hard, desperate mood, and reckless of consequences, he replied:
“I did say it. Your mother was a far different woman from mine.”
“Oh, Jack,” and Annie put both her hands beseechingly toward him. “Oh Jack, who was mother, then, and where is she now, tell me?” she cried, while Maude and Edna both looked up reprovingly, and the former said:
“How could you be so imprudent, Jack, and she so sick and weak?”
“Because I’m a brute, I suppose, and feel sometimes like blurting out things I must not say,” Jack replied, as he tried to quiet Annie, who insisted upon knowing “who and where her mother was.”
“Ask Georgie, she may tell you, but I cannot,” Jack answered her at last, and with that reply Annie had to be satisfied.
Both Maude and Edna staid by her during the night, forgetful of their own fatigue, and scarcely giving a thought to the brilliant party of the next evening, or the worn, tired faces they would carry to it, provided they went at all, which seemed very doubtful, as the daylight came creeping into the room, and showed them the change in their patient. She was not dying; she might linger for two or three days longer, the physician said, when at sunrise he came, but there was the sign of death upon her face, and she lay perfectly motionless, only speaking occasionally to ask what time it was; if it was to-night the party was to take place, and if Georgie would surely come after it was over. Her absorbing thought was to see Georgie once more, or “sister,” as she still called her, for the idea did not seem to have entered her mind that Georgie was not her sister, even though the kind woman whom she remembered well had not been her mother.