“Yes,” she answered, clinging to him like a child.
“She’s been bad all the way. I guess she’s sick, or going to be,” the conductor said, giving her up to Kenneth, who took her in his arms just as he had taken little Connie sixteen years before, when she came in her blue cloak and hood and crept into his heart.
As he had done then, so now he carried her to the sleigh and put her in and tucked the robes around her and took his seat beside her, and was out upon the road before a word was spoken. Then he said, “Connie, are you ill?”
She had sat in a drooping posture till now, when she straightened up, and moving a little nearer to him, she replied: “I don’t know. I was sick on the ship, and I am so tired, and my head feels queer; but I am glad to be here. Are you glad? Is your mother glad?”
“Glad?” Kenneth repeated, and there was a world of tenderness in his voice as he drew Connie close to him and put her head upon his shoulder, where it lay through the drive home, which did not take long, for Pro and Con, and especially the latter, defying the snow and the wind and the drifts, went swiftly up the hill, nearly upsetting the sleigh as they turned into a field, but finally reaching the house in safety.
Once during the drive Connie said, by way of explanation for her unexpected appearance: “I had to come. I couldn’t stay in that dreary old palace in Genoa after Count Costello said words to me he never should have said. You know my aunt married him?”
Kenneth did know, but forebore to ask any questions, they were so near home.
“Oh, I am so glad, so glad!” Connie kept saying, when carried into the warmth and light, where Mrs. Stannard’s motherly arms received her.
As his father took care of the horses, Kenneth removed Connie’s hat and sack and gloves and chafed her cold hands, and thought how thin and pale she was, and how she sometimes rambled in her talk. She was not hungry, she said. She was only tired and sleepy. She did not sleep at all upon the ship. She did not think she had slept since she left Genoa, or for some time before. She would not eat, and Kenneth, who was watching her closely, advised his mother to take her to her room.
“Oh, this is so nice; this takes me back to long ago,” Connie said, kneeling on the hearth when there, and holding her hands to the blaze just as Kenneth had seen her do when a child. “There are pictures in the fire,” she continued; “pictures of me as I was a happy little girl and as I am now an unhappy woman,” and she clasped her white hands together.