“I will purchase a good machine, and you shall learn,” she said kindly.
“Oh, how kind you are to me! I wish I knew how to thank you for all your goodness,” cried the poor girl, with tears of gratitude.
Mrs. Beach smiled and answered:
“Only stay with me while I live, Pansy, and I shall be well rewarded. After all, my kindness to you is only a species of selfishness, for I wish to have you with me. It brightens my lonely life to have the beautiful face of a young girl about me all the time.”
They stayed in San Diego a year, and every month made the exquisite place more dear to them. Pansy worked industriously at her typewriting machine, and became quite proficient; but she did not neglect her kind benefactress.
It was both her duty and her pleasure to add as much of happiness as possible to the life of the suffering invalid. In doing so she reaped the rich reward of those who try to lighten the sorrows of others, for she had less time to think of her own, and in consequence was far less unhappy.
There was not a day in which she did not thank Heaven for providing such a safe haven for her when she had fled, frightened and despairing, from her old home; not a day in which she did not pray for the dear ones she had left behind. Most bitterly she repented the willfulness that had led to all her sorrow.
“Had I only minded my mother, no harm would have come to me,” she sighed over and over.
Suddenly over the calm, peaceful life they were leading in the little cottage home fell a dark shadow.
Mrs. Beach had been failing for some time, and at last it became only too evident to Pansy and the few friends they had made in San Diego that her days were numbered. The invalid herself was not ignorant of the fact, for after an interview with her physician one day she sent for Pansy and gently broke the sad tidings that she had, in all probability, but a few weeks to live.