was a tardy tribute, she felt, but as welcome as it
was deserved.

"With a lot of common sense and a physique like yours, you ought to make
a good nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly,
divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and
how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and
irritable and--even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that
recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives;
and this recognition made him seem more human to them than any other
adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard
row to hoe, that poor, bad Split. She must sleep, and you understand
her--Lord! Lord! the care these queer little devils need!" he muttered,
shaking his shoulders as he went on down the steps, as though physically
to throw off responsibility.

Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she
thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it
inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the
sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled
it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of
suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure
missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a
playmate or a fighting-mate--it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a
drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It
must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision
of pretty young death--herself in white and the mysterious glamour of
the silent sleep. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!

Split, with shorn head and with wide-open eyes and hard, flushed
cheeks, lay tossing on the big bed in the room off the parlor, which had
seldom been used since Frances was born there. "Mother's bed" the
Madigans always called it, and they crept into it when ailing, as though
it still held something of the old curative magic for childish aches,
though all but Kate had forgotten the mother's face as it was before she
lay down there the last time. Split had a big hot silver dollar in one
hand,--Francis Madigan's way of recognizing and sympathizing with a
child's illness,--and in the other an undivided orange, evidence enough
of an extraordinary occasion in the Madigan household. But she was not
waking. She was not sleeping. She was not dreaming. She kn