“I think you’re not sleepy, but just asleep,” said Mr. Norton, catching him up in his arms, and carrying him to his mother to say good-night.
Milly went very soberly and quietly up to bed, and for some little time she lay awake, her little heart feeling very sore and heavy about the “sad things” in the world. Then with her thoughts full of Becky she fell asleep.
So ended Milly’s birthday, a happy day and a sorrowful day, all in one. When Milly grew older there was no birthday just before or after it she remembered half so clearly as that on which she was seven years old.
[CHAPTER X]
Last Days at Ravensnest
On Friday morning the children and their father trudged up very early to the farm to get news of Becky. She had had a bad night Mr. Backhouse said, but she had taken some milk and beef-tea; she knew her father and mother quite well, and she had asked twice for Tiza. The doctor said they must just be patient. Quiet and rest would make her well again, and nothing else, and Tiza was not to go home for a day or two.
As for poor Tiza, a long sleep had cheered her up greatly, and when Milly and Olly went to take her out with them after breakfast, they found her almost as merry and chatty as usual. But she didn’t like being kept at the Wheelers’s, though they were very kind to her; and it was all Mrs. Wheeler could do to prevent her from slipping up to the farm unknown to anybody.
“They don’t have porridge for breakfast,” said Tiza, tossing her head, when she and Milly were out together. “Mother always gives us porridge. And I won’t sit next Charlie. He’s always dirtying hisself. He stickied hisself just all over this morning with treacle. Mother would have given him a clout.”
However, on the whole, she was as good as such a wild creature could be, and the children and she had some capital times together. Wheeler the gardener let them gather strawberries and currants for making jam, a delightful piece of work, which helped to keep Tiza out of mischief and make her contented with staying away from home more than anything else. At last, after three days, the doctor said she might come home if she would promise to be quiet in the house. So one bright evening Tiza slipped into the farmhouse and squeezed in after her mother to the little room where Becky was lying, a white-faced feverish little creature, low down among the pillows.