'It's no wonder I am white,' I said in a surly tone. 'I have been mewed up in the house almost ever since Sharley and all of them went away.'
And then grandmamma explained about my having been ill.
'I'm very sorry,' said Jerry, 'but you look worse than Helena, Mrs. Wingfield.'
I felt crosser and crosser. I fancied he meant to reproach me with grandmamma's looking ill, even though it made me uneasy too. I glanced at her—a faint pink flush had come over her face at his words.
'I don't think granny looks ill at all,' I said.
'No, indeed, I am very well,' she said, with a smile.
Gerard said no more, but I know he thought me a selfish spoilt child. And from that moment he set himself to watch grandmamma and to find out if anything was really the matter.
He did find out, and that pretty quickly, I fancy, that we were much poorer. But it was very difficult for him to do anything to help grandmamma. She was so dignified, and in some ways reserved. She got a letter from Mrs. Nestor a few days later, thanking her for reading with Jerry again, and saying that of course the lessons must be arranged about as before. And it vexed her a very little. (She has told me about it since.) Perhaps she was feeling unusually sensitive and depressed just then. But however that may have been, she wrote a letter to Mrs. Nestor, which made her really afraid of offering to pay. It was not as if there was time for a good many lessons, granny wrote—would not Mrs. Nestor let her render this very small service as a friend?
And Jerry did not know what he could do. It was not the season for game, except rabbits—and he did send rabbits two or three times—and I know now that he scarcely dared to stay to tea, or not to stay, for if he refused granny seemed hurt.
On the whole, nice as he was, it was almost a relief when he went away back to school.