So they turned Ker Annic upside down for me. To leave father and mother and friends is a thing you have to do quickly and with immediate acceptance of the consequences, or not to do at all. You mustn't begin to let people be kind to you.
And no less than in material things were they solicitous to keep from me anything that might worry me. Madge laughed away my apologies for the havoc I made of her engagements, Alec vowed that it was a top-hole way of spending a holiday to sit at my open window, pretending he was smoking outside, while the gentle summer breeze that stirred the curtains blew it all in again. I think his crowning kindness was to get in a barber daily to shave me. Were I to grow a beard I fear it would not be a golden one.
And even Jennie visited me once or twice, which is very much indeed from seventeen who has never known a headache to one who has known more than he cares to think about.
On Jennie's first two visits to me other people were in and out of the room; but on the third occasion I was alone. It was mid-afternoon, and Madge and Alec, I knew, had gone out to pay a call. They had left me everything that I was likely to need until their return, and I had imagined the house to be empty. But Jennie tapped and entered, and asked me how I was. Then she crossed over and stood by the window, where the sun touched the gold of her hair and showed the shadow of her arms within her light sleeves.
"Nothing very amusing to do this afternoon, Jennie?" I asked from my pillow.
"No, only pottering about," she replied.
"Then won't you come and have tea with me presently?"
"I'll order it now if you like."
"Do, and then come back and sit with me unless it bores you."
She went out, and presently returned. She was not particularly good about a sick-room. She gave a superfluous touch to things here and there, and then bent over me and shook my pillow with a gesture that somehow reminded me of that quick little run to her mother's side at the tramway terminus at St Briac.