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She looked and saw her mother, clad in such wear as Laurella's taste could select and Laurella's beauty make effective. The slight, dark little woman was coming in from the dining room with her children all about her, a noble group.
"Why, she looks more like your sister," he said. Laurella's white teeth flashed at this, and her big, dark eyes glowed. "Johnnie's such a serious-minded person that she favours older than her years," the mother told him. "Well, I give her the name of the dead, and they say that makes a body solemn like."
"Oh I forgive you, if that's any account to you," returned Laurella with kindly contempt. "I never noticed that forgiving things undid the harm any; but yes oh, of course I forgive you. Go along; I'm tired now. Don't bother me any more, Gid; I want to sleep." The old man thrust the treasured bankbook under Laurella's pillow, and hurried away.
She was glad to remember that little bankbook under Laurella's pillow. Mavity and Mandy would tend the invalids well, helped by little Lissy; and with money available, she was sure they would be allowed to lack for nothing. She crossed the hall swiftly, meaning to go past the little grocery where they bought their supplies and telephone Mavity that she might be away for several days.
In the gray dawn of Monday morning, when Johnnie was downstairs eating her bit of early breakfast, Pap shambled in to make Laurella's fire. Having got the hickory wood to blazing, he sat humped and shame-faced by the bedside a while, whispering to his wife and holding her hand, a sight for the student of man to marvel at.
It was in Laurella's evident influence that Johnnie put her trust when, one evening, they all sat in Sunday leisure in the front room most of the girls being gone to church or out strolling with "company" Pap Himes broached the question of the children going to work in the mill. "They're too young, Pap," Johnnie said to him mildly. "They ought to be in school this winter."
For nobody understood, as the crazed man in the hospital might have done, that Laurella's bodily illness was but the cosmic despair of the little girl who has broken her doll. It had been the philosophy of this sun-loving, butterfly nature to turn her back on things when they got too bad and take to her bed till, in the course of events, they bettered themselves.
Well, may God bless her, I say, and let me live to go to sea with Laurella's eldest born, rowing me in his father's place! Ah! well, indeed! l'Arrabiata!" During many long years Hermann Fabricius had lost sight of his friend Henry Warren, and had forgotten him. Yet when students together they had loved each other dearly, and more than once they had sworn eternal friendship.
Then, noticing for the first time the unwonted gaiety of Laurella's costume, the glowing cheeks and bright eyes, she smiled in relief. "You don't look sick. My, but you're fine! You're as spick and span as a bride." The old man bent and spat over the wheel, preparatory to speaking, but his daughter took the words from his mouth.
Seating himself upon a little stool, he untied the handkerchief that bound it; the blood, so long repressed, gushed out again; all round the wound the hand was swollen high. He washed it carefully, cooling it in the water; then he clearly saw the marks of Laurella's teeth. "She was right," he said; "I was a brute, and deserved no better. I will send her back the handkerchief by Giuseppe to-morrow.
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