"What is it, darling?" asked a gentle voice from the darkness, and Peace, clutching wildly for some human support in her hour of anguish, threw her arms about the figure kneeling at her bedside, and cried in terror, "O, Grandma, I can't, I can't!"
"Can't what?" asked the sweet voice, thinking the child was a victim of some bad dream, for she never suspected that Peace could know the dreadful truth.
"I can't stay here all the rest of my life! I wasn't made for the bed. My feet won't keep still. I must run and shout. O, Grandma, tell me it isn't true!"
But the gentle voice was silent, and the woman's tears mingling with those of the grief-stricken child told the story. Clasping the quivering little body more tightly in her arms, the silvery-haired grandmother sobbed without restraint until the child's grief was spent, and from sheer exhaustion Peace fell asleep.
Then, loosing the grip of the slender hands, now grown so thin and white, she laid her burden back on the bed, and as she kissed the wet cheeks and left the weary slumberer to her troubled dreams, she whispered sadly, "Good-night, little Peace,—and good-bye. We have lost our merry little sprite. It will be a different Peace who wakens with the morrow."
CHAPTER V
THE LILAC LADY'S MESSAGE
Mercifully, Peace slept long the next morning, and it was not until the sun was high in the sky that she opened her eyes to her surroundings. Then it was with a heavy sense of something wrong, and she stared uneasily about her, trying to remember what was the trouble.