About this time she had a most uncomfortable siege of chicken-pox, and was obliged for two days to keep her room, looking sadly disfigured by the pink, puffy blotches which rose on her skin, and feeling very forlorn because her poor red eyes were too weak to admit of her reading.
"What does make me look so?" said she, almost crying, as she gazed at her face in the glass. "And, oh, Ninny, I feel a great deal worse than I look! I can tell you people wouldn't laugh so much about chicken-pox if they knew how it feels!"
"Yes, dear, I'm sure it must be dreadful," returned Ninny,—her real name was Julia,—with ready sympathy. "You woke me up ever so many times last night screaming."
"Screaming? Why, I didn't know it! I must have been crazy!"
When ill, it was no unusual thing for the Gray children to be slightly delirious; and Flaxie often laughed over the droll speeches which she was reported to have made, but of which she herself could not recall a single word.
"What did I say last night when I was crazy?"
"You sat up in bed and cried for your 'little pinono,'—the doll's piano, I suppose. And sometimes you seemed to think it had turned into a wolf, for you kept saying, 'Why, what great, big teeth you've got! Oh, they're to eat you the better, my dear!'"
Flaxie smiled faintly, and then, feeling very miserable, wiped away a tear, thinking,—