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Walking across the floor, she opened the door, and looked in. The boy's body had been embalmed, and placed in a coffin which rested in the centre of the room; and an English clergyman, a friend of Mr. Manning's, stood at the head of the corpse, and read the burial service. Mrs. Andrews and Hattie were weeping in one corner and Mr. Manning leaned against the window, with his hand on Lila's curls.
"It was mostly due to her that I came to college," continued Bea with an effort to speak naturally though her fingers shook the least bit in their grasp of the brush, and one anxious eye was watching Lila's face. "I've known her all my life. She persuaded the family to send me, and she tutored me last summer and helped in a million different ways. You don't understand how much I owe her.
That evening when I returned I found the whole editorial board and Berta too groaning in Lila's study while Laura acted as amanuensis for a composite letter to Robbie Belle. You see, they had eaten too much dinner three hours at the table and everything too good to skip. Each one tried to put a different groan into the letter.
Lila's face flushed, for since the war Nathan had grown into one of the most respectable of freedmen, but Uncle Boaz, with a glib tongue, started valiantly to her support. "Go 'way, ole miss; dat ar Natan is de mos' ornery un er de hull bunch," he declared. "Wen he comes inter my dinin'-'oom, out I'se gwine, an' days sho." The old lady passed a hand slowly across her brow.
But Lila's wild-flower face, in spite of its lovely tints and outlines, seemed almost icy in its expression of haughty criticism. No wonder, then, that this miniature world of college reflected a different countenance to each. "Aren't they the dearest, sweetest girls you ever saw!" exclaimed Bea as the two freshmen turned from the curving concrete walk into the road that led to the orchard.
I can do it in a twinkling." Cynthia declined his knightly offer, to be overruled again by Lila's smiling lips. "Christopher will have to do it when he comes in, " she said; "poor Christopher, he never has a single moment of his own." Jim Weatherby looked at her eagerly, his blue eyes full of sparkle.
Cynthia grew drawn and pinched with a sickly, frost-bitten look, and even Lila's rare bloom drooped for a while like that of a delicate plant starving for the sunshine. Christopher, who, as usual, was belated in his winter's work, was kept busy hauling and chopping wood, shovelling the snow away from the porch and the paths that led to the well, the stable, and the barn.
Lila's thin shoulders gave an irritable little shrug under the silken folds of her dressing-gown, and her finely cut features screwed for an instant into an expression of impatient dislike. It was only for an instant then the mask of her conventional courtesy dropped again between the two convalescents. "Why not tell the doctor or the nurse what you wish to write? They will attend to it for you.
Lila's expression changed from the pained sympathy of friendship to the scientific zeal of character study. "Girls, have you noticed Mary Winchester lately? It is the strangest thing! She seems more alone and alien than ever. The girls avoid her as if she had the plague. In the library and the corridor to-day it was as plain as could be. They stop talking when she comes around.
"I guess you'd rather anyhow have all your time to write poetry instead of studying." She glanced around just in time to see Lila's lips set in a grimmer line as the lead in the short pencil snapped beneath a more impatient jab of the dull knife. She laughed teasingly. "What's the use of writing all that stuff now? You're wearing out your pencil fast.
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