“How much you love that hymn, don’t you?” Florence said, looking out from her room to smile on the bright-faced girl.
“Yes,” said Jean, “I do; it gives me a kind of thrill to sing it. I used to be afraid it; I liked the tune and could not help humming it, but the words seemed impossible. Do you remember that night you were going to a party in your glorified gown, and I kept singing,”
“‘I shall wake again at morning’s dawn, I shall put on glory then.’”
“You said I was mixing things? That is the way I felt about it, although I could not keep from humming it; but that was because I was in love with the tune; the words repelled me; I thought it must be awful to have to live with the thought of dying right before one all the time; that is what I thought religion ought to be!” She laughed gleefully. “It’s anything but that, isn’t it? Dying is just an experience, somewhere along the road, that isn’t pleasant, in itself, because it is associated with sickness and pain; but, after all, it is only for a minute, compared with all the days and years; and the living part all along is glorious, isn’t it?”
“It ought to be,” Florence admitted, gravely; and her eyes, as they followed her young sister, had a wistful look. As she closed her door she said within herself: “She has a different religion from mine, some way; I wonder why it is?”
Following hard upon the joy and gratitude of the Forman family over Jean’s complete recovery came the burden of bills, and bills, and bills! so although nothing could take away that joy, it was tempered with anxiety. Straining every nerve as they had been doing before in order to meet their daily expenses and have a margin left to apply toward that fateful mortgage, it was not possible to get through the days, and especially the nights, without being stared at by that insistent question: “How are we to manage those extra expenses entailed by sickness?” It was good for Jean that she was still a young girl upon whom responsibilities of any sort had never pressed, else it might have been hard for her to live up to the radiant joy that seemed to enfold her. It would have been so easy for the Jean whom they had known, to sink into gloom over the thought that her unusual attack of obstinacy was in part responsible for these extra burdens. Fearing something of this kind, the entire family had earnestly enjoined one another not to talk over financial anxieties before Jean. Neither did they, of course, say anything intentionally about such burdens before Aunt Elsie. One who had nothing of her own, but was dependent upon relatives for her daily living, was the last person before whom to talk of the cost of living. By common consent the responsible members of the family had agreed that she should never hear a word which might make her think that her coming to them had added a feather’s weight to their daily budget.
“Mother, hasn’t she any money?” Florence had asked one day, after they had been cautioning one another about letting their guest know of their financial stress.
“Very little, I think, dear; your father never knew much about the settling up of the estate, but your Uncle Evarts told him that there was only a paltry sum left for Elsie; not enough to clothe her decently, he said, to say nothing of her board.”
“Well,” Florence had said, after a thoughtful silence, “Uncle Evarts needn’t worry his precious self; as long as this family has any crusts to eat she is more than welcome to her share, isn’t she, mother?”
Mrs. Forman’s response had been hearty, closing, as it so often did, with the refrain: “It really doesn’t seem as though we could ever again get along without her.”