“I’m very well, thank you, Mr. O’Leary,” I said.
“And Miss Barret, how’s herself?”
“Oh, she’s well, too. She had to go out for a couple of hours.”
“Sure then I’ll stay and take care of you mesilf,” said Tim. “I’m dead tired. Standing behind a bar is hard on the feet; so if you don’t mind, I’ll be taking off my shoes and stretch mesilf out on the couch for a rest.”
I assured him I would be very glad to have him do it. The big man worked sometimes ten and twelve hours at a stretch, and it was so quiet and peaceful in this room, I felt the rest would do him good, just as it was doing me.
XXXVIII
THE sun was shining and the warm breath of summer felt good to me. I was up now; but I felt impatient with my own weakness and I had a restless desire to move about and do things. I realized my indebtedness to Lois, and I wondered if I would ever be able to wipe it out.
I had had very dreadful news from my people. Wallace, Ellen’s husband, had died after a long illness. When I first heard that I wanted to go at once to my sister, and I was heart-broken because of my inability to comfort and help her. Lois wrote to Ellen for me, telling her that I would join her in New York, just as soon as I was strong enough to travel; but Ellen had written back that she was going to England with her little boy to Wallace’s people.
I thought of how close Ellen and I had been to each other as children, and of the strangeness and cruelty of fate that cut sisters apart. It seemed to me that this was a world of all pain. Yet, if we measured our griefs by those of others, mine shrank into insignificance beside those of Ellen. Always there had been some way out for me, but Ellen’s road had been walled up. Death had shut to her forever the golden door of Hope. I knew that no one—not even her little son—could ever take to Ellen the place of Wallace, her young hero and lover and husband. Poor Wallace! Literary critics had said he was a genius, and I think that he was. He was only twenty-seven when he died, with his second book of essays but half written and his play still unproduced.
Lois had a little gas stove in the room on which she boiled coffee and eggs. She called to me to come now to breakfast. I said to her sadly: