“If I—if my eyes don’t get all right, what will you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—will you stay on in the business?”
“In any case, it’s my job, isn’t it?” returned Paul evasively. Then suddenly, he dropped his face in his hands. For so many nights, in the little room to which he had been relegated since Carl’s illness, he had been wrestling with that problem. A hundred times he had decided that there would be only one course open to him in the event that Carl should not get well; he would stay with his family and help them. His uncle was getting old, and the silent, tragic appeal in the poor man’s eyes, and his dreadful anxiety about his son had touched Paul even more than Aunt Gertrude’s sorrow.
“Ah, well, what’s the use of trying to settle the whole course of your life,” he said aloud, but more as if he were speaking to himself. “You get worked up, and start pitying yourself before there’s anything definite to pity yourself for.” Then suddenly, he said, “Tell me, cousin, I have wanted to ask you—why is it that you hated me? If you don’t want to answer never mind. We seem to be friends now—or I may be mistaken.”
Carl was silent for several moments, then he said rather gruffly,
“I—there was no reason perhaps. Let that be. You were right—when you said that I didn’t hate you as much as I thought I did.”
That was the last reference that was made to their former enmity. They were too different, perhaps, ever to be really intimate, but the hatchet was buried between them.
During Carl’s convalescence Paul was with him a great deal. His stock of stories seemed inexhaustible, and in lieu of books Carl found them the only source of novel entertainment to be had; and for the time being Paul was exempted from his duties in the Bakery to amuse his cousin. It was not any too amusing for him; but he willingly passed hour after hour at Carl’s bedside. It was the sight of the bandaged eyes that kept his sympathy keen and made him gentle and patient even when Carl was fretful and hard to please.
One day Carl said to him,