“Then God be praised!” cried Agnes in her excitement. “I can cook. We could both do that in the old days. Everything he takes must be prepared here. We will take him into our own hands.”
Mary grew pale with the contagion of her sister’s excitement. “Do you think,” she said in a terrified whisper, “that she will try such a dreadful thing again?”
“Those who do it once may do it a hundred times,” said Agnes, with the solemnity of a popular belief. “I feel as if I were living in an enemy’s camp; but you and I will save the boy.”
CHAPTER L.
When Letty came stealing into the ante-room as soon as she was up, which was between seven and eight in the morning, she was received by Miss Hill with a stern countenance, to the double surprise of the anxious girl, who did not know she was in the house, nor that the kind Aunt Agnes, in whom she had claimed a share for years, could look forbidding.
“Oh, you are here!” Letty said, with a little shriek of pleasure. “He will get all right now you are here.”
“Why should he get well now I am here?” cried Agnes, with a gloom of suspicion which Letty did not understand. “Was there anything wrong?”
The girl echoed the “wrong!” with a wondering face. “The nurses were very, very kind,” she said, “but one wants to have somebody one is fond of. They would not let me be here.”
“Are you fond of him?”
“I——oh,” said Letty, with a flush of generous feeling, “how can you ask me that? Fond of Mar? Duke and I, and Tiny would die for Mar—if that would do him any good.”