“How much better you seem, dear,” she said, setting the tray on his knees, and shaking up his pillows. “Paul, your lunch is waiting for you.” She sent him a grateful glance.
“If you haven’t anything special to do, come on up when you’ve fed,” suggested Carl elegantly. Elise nodded eagerly, and following Paul to the door, said in a low voice,
“I wish you would, cousin. There isn’t much to be done to-day—I can take care of it, and it seems to have done him so much good.”
So Paul spent the afternoon, a long, sunny afternoon, in that dark room, talking to his cousin, telling him about people he had seen—and what a heterogeneous collection they were!—places he had visited, adventures he and his father had had together. A whole new world he opened to the young bookworm, who listened with his hands folded, and a keen but detached interest, to all these tales of action and happy-go-lucky wanderings.
“All that’s great to hear about,” remarked Carl, “but I don’t think I’d like to live that way. Too much hopping about, and too—uncomfortable.”
“I suppose it was uncomfortable—but I never knew what it was to be comfortable—that is, to be sure of a good bed to sleep in, and plenty to eat, and all that—so I never minded.”
“It must bore you to be cooped up here—baking cakes! Ha-ha!” Carl laughed outright. “I never thought before of how funny that was!”
“I have,” remarked Paul, drily.
“What do you suppose that Bill Tyler would say?”
“I can’t imagine,” replied Paul, smiling glumly. “He’d probably say it was a good job, and that I ought to thank Heaven for it. He was a practical old egg, or he pretended to be. He was forever preaching what he called ‘hard sense’—and getting himself into more tight squeezes—he was worse than father. He had more common sense and used it less than any man I ever saw.”