"I don't think any one has been more sorry than Harold. Why, for the first few days after you were taken so ill he just walked the floor all the time he was in the house, and when grandma asked what ailed him, he said, 'I am thinking of Maude, and am afraid my call upon her was the cause of the attack.'"
"N-n—" Maude began, but checked herself in time, and taking up her slate, wrote, "Tell him it was not his call. I am glad he came."
All day and all night Jerrie sat by her, sometimes talking to her and answering the questions she wrote upon the slate, but oftener in perfect silence, when Maude seemed to be asleep. Then Jerrie's tears fell like rain, the face upon the pillow looked so much like death, and she kept repeating to herself the lines:
"We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died."
When the warm July morning looked in at the windows of the sick-room, bringing with it the perfume of hundreds of flowers blooming on the lawn, and the scent of the hay cut the previous day, it found Jerrie still watching by Maude, her own face tired and pale, with dark rings about her eyes, which were heavy with tears and wakefulness. She had not slept at all, and her head was beginning to ache frightfully when the nurse came in and relieved her, telling her breakfast was ready. Maude was awake, and wrote eagerly upon the slate:
"You'll come back? You'll stay all day? You do me so much good, and I am a great deal better for your being here."
Jerrie hesitated a moment; her head was aching so hard that she longed to get away. But selfishness was not one of Jerrie's faults, and putting her own wishes aside, she said:
"Yes, I will stay until afternoon, and then I must go home. I did not tell you that Harold was going away to-night, did I?"
Maude shook her head, and Jerrie went on:
"You know, perhaps, that some time ago a Mr. Wilson, of Truesdale, sued Peterkin for some infringement on a patent, or something of that sort."