“It’s this way,” he explained as he slipped out of his outside things. “I’m spending the winter up on the hill, in the hotel lodge. It’s been getting sort of lonesome there lately since winter set in, so I thought—I—it seemed sort of nice to come around and look up some of the neighbors.” David finished out of breath.
Alfredo and his mother exchanged glances.
“That is good,” said the boy at last. “You are the first one, and we, too, have been what you call ‘lonesome.’”
“I’m awfully sorry.” And this time David held out the unmittened fist. “Say, do you mind if I build up that fire a little? It looks sort of—sick.”
“Ah!” The woman held up protesting hands. “Alfredo is too sick but to lie still. And I—what do I know about building fires in open places with wood? It is only the carbon I know, and the shut stove. And when our servant leave us three—four day ago and no one ever comes near to us I think then that we die of the cold before long time.”
Tears of utter despair showed in the woman’s eyes; and David found his own growing sympathetically moist.
“Oh, no! Barney wouldn’t let that happen—not to any one.”
It really was dreadful to find a sick boy and a woman alone—strangers in this country—with the cold and the loneliness to fight.
“Now you tell me where the wood is, and I’ll have a cracker-jack fire in a minute. Barney’s showed me how. I can make ’em burn even when the wood’s damp.” David did not finish without a tinge of pride in his tone.
He made several trips to the little back room beyond the kitchen which served as woodshed, and in a few minutes he had a generous stack of logs and kindlings beside the hearth and a roaring fire blazing up the big chimney. The glow and warmth lit up Alfredo’s cheeks and kindled a new life in the woman’s eyes. Such a little thing it takes sometimes to put the hearts back in people.