"And she was glad?"
"Yes. I need a little lad in my office, and when I take the car you can ride with me."
And thus it came about that little François, a sober little François, with a band of black about his arm, became one of the Crossroads household, and was made much of by the women, even by black Milly, who baked cookies for him and tarts whenever he cried for his mother.
Cousin Sulie rose nobly to meet the new demands upon her. "It is a feeling I never had before," she said to Richard, as she helped him pack his bag before going on his rounds, "that what I am doing is worth while. I know I should have felt it when I was darning stockings, but I didn't."
She gloried in the professional aspect which she gave to everything. She installed little François at a small table in the Garden Room. He answered the telephone and wrote the messages on slips of paper which he laid on the doctor's desk. Cousin Sulie at another table saw the people who came in Richard's absence.
"Nancy can read to the patients up-stairs and cut flowers for them and cook nice things for them," she confided, "but I like to be down here when the children come in to ask for medicine, and when the mothers come to find out what they shall feed the convalescents. Richard, I never heard anything like their—hungriness—when they are getting well."
Beulah, emerging slowly from among the shadows, began to think of things to eat. She didn't care about anything else. She didn't care for Eric's love, or her mother's gladness, or Richard's cheerfulness, or the nurses' sympathy. She cared only to think of every kind of food that she had ever liked in her whole life, and to ask if she might have it.
"But, dear heart, the doctor doesn't think that you should," Eric would protest.
She would cry, weakly, "You don't love me, or you would let me."
She begged and begged, and at last he couldn't stand it.