“You are hesitating,” he said, reproachfully; “and on my last morning, when we shall not see each other for months;” And Nan moved towards the veranda slowly, and gathered a crimson one without a word, and put it in his hand.
“Thank you,” he said, quite quietly; but he detained the hand as well as the rose for a moment. “One day I will show you this again, and tell you what it means if you do not know; and then we shall see, ah, Nan, my––” He paused as Phillis’s step entered the room, and said hurriedly, in a low voice, “Good-bye; I will not go in again. I don’t want to see any of them, only you,—only you. Good-bye: take care of yourself for my sake, Nan.” And Dick looked at her wistfully, and dropped her hand.
“Has he gone?” asked Phillis, looking up in surprise as her sister came through the open window; “has he gone without finding anything out?”
“Yes, he has gone, and he does not know anything,” replied Nan, in a subdued voice, as she seated herself behind the urn. It was over now, and she was ready for anything. “Take care of yourself for my sake, Nan!”—that was ringing in her ears; but she had not said a word in reply. Only the rose lay in his hand,—her parting gift, and perhaps her parting pledge.
CHAPTER IX.
A LONG DAY.
Nan never recalled the memory of that “long gray day,” as she inwardly termed it, without a shiver of discomfort.
Never but once in her bright young life had she known such a day, and that was when her dead father lay in the darkened house, and her widowed mother had crept weeping into her 63 arms as to her only remaining refuge; but that stretched so far back into the past that it had grown into a vague remembrance.