you let me know you were ill? I would have
gone down to Wesley. Oh!--I KNEW something was the matter with you or
you would have answered my letters."

He had struggled to his feet at the first sound of her footsteps in
the hall, and had her in his arms long before she had finished her
greeting;--indeed her last sentence was addressed to the collar of his
coat against which her cheek was cushioned.

"Who said I was ill?" he asked with one of his bubbling laughs when he
got his breath.

"Todd told Ben--and you ARE!--and it breaks my heart." She was holding
herself off now, scanning his pale face and shrunken frame--"Oh, I am so
sorry you did not let me know!"

"Todd is a chatterer, and Ben no better; I've only had a bad cold--and
you couldn't have done me a bit of good if you had come--and now I am
entirely well, never felt better in my life. Oh--but it's good to get
hold of you, Kate,--and you are still the same bunch of roses. Sit down
now and tell me all about it. I wish I had a better chair for you, my
dear, but the place is quite dismantled, as you see. I expected to stay
the winter when I left."

She had not given a thought to the chair or to the changes--had not even
noticed them. That the room was stripped of its furniture prior to a
long stay was what invariably occurred in her own house every summer:
it was her precious uncle's pale, shrunken face and the blue veins that
showed in the backs of his dear transparent hands which she held between
her own, and the thin, emaciated wrists that absorbed her.

"You poor, dear Uncle George!" she purred--"and nobody to look after
you." He had drawn up Pawson's chair and had placed her in it beside the
one he sat in, and had then dropped slowly into his own, the better to
hide from her his weakness--but it did not deceive her. "I'm going to
have you put back to bed this very minute; you are not strong enough to
sit up. Let me call Aunt Jemima."

St. George shook his head good-naturedly in denial and smoothed her
hands with his fingers.

"Call nobody and do nothing but sit beside me and let me look into your
face and listen to your voice. I have been pretty badly shaken up; had
two weeks of it that couldn't have been much worse--but since then I
have been on the mend and am getting stronger every minute. I haven't
had any medicine and I don't want any now--I just want you and--" he
hesitated, and seeing nothing in her eyes of any future hope for Harry,
finished th