"Only an hour? I thought you would never come."
"See, father, I've brought you a softer pillow," she would say, smiling his plaints into oblivion. It was the smile with which she had caught the grape-thief by the fence, the one with which she had charmed a Devonshire lad, now gone three years and more—the tenderest smile I ever saw, save one, and the saddest, though not mournful, it was so genuine, so gentle, and so unselfish, and her eyes shone lovingly the while. Its sadness, as I think now of it, lay not so much in the smile itself as in the wonder of it that she smiled at all.
The mater—was she not always mother to the motherless?—was Letitia's angel in those weary days, carried fresh loaves of good brown bread to her, a pot of beans, or a pie, perhaps, passing with them through the hole in the picket-fence. I can see her now standing on Letitia's kitchen doorstep with the swathed dish in her hands.
"The good fairy," Letitia called her; and when she was for crying—for cry she must sometimes, though not for the world before her father's eyes—she shed her tears in the kitchen in the mater's arms. So it was that while I was yet a school-boy an elder sister was born unto our house and became forever one of the Weatherbys by a tie—not of blood, I have said before, yet it was of blood, now that I come to think of it—it was of gentle, gentle human blood.
There was an old nurse now to share Letitia's vigils, but only the daughter's tender hands knew how to please. She scarcely left him. Doctor or friends met the same answer, smiling but unalterable: she would rather stay. Not a night passed that she did not waken of her own anxiety to slip softly to his bedside. He smiled her welcome, and she sat beside him with his poor, thin hand in hers, sometimes till the dawn of day.
Day by day like that, all through the silent watches of the darkened world, that gentle handmaiden laid her sacrifice upon the altar of her duty, without a murmur, without one bitter word. It was her youth she laid there; it was her girlhood and her bloom of womanhood, her first, her very last young years—sparkle of eyes, rose and fulness of maiden cheeks, the golden moments of that flower-time when Love goes choosing, playtime's silvery laughter and blithe, untrammelled song.
"'Titia," he said to her, "there's no poem—'alf so beaut'ful—'s your love, m' dear."
The words were a crown to her. He set it on her bowed head with his trembling fingers.
"Soft—brown 'air," he murmured. He could not see how the gray was coming there.
Spring came, scenting his room with apple blooms; summer, filling it with orient airs—but he was gone.