sang Jack, in a clear baritone that made up in volume what it lacked in quality. “I don’t know but I’ll have to take to the tall timber, if I don’t find my school-books. Barberry, have you seen anything of my Greek since the twenty-sixth of last June?”

“All the school-books are piled on the rubber-box in the vestibule,” said Barbara. “I suppose your Greek is among them. Hurry, David; you’ll have to put on a clean blouse before you start, and it’s after eight, now.”

David’s voice came from the pillows of the couch, where he had curled himself into a disconsolate little ball,—“I’m not going to school to-day, Barbara.”

“Why not?” asked his sister.

“I’ve got a headache, and my shoulders are tired.”

“First symptoms of the nine o’clock disease,” commented Jack; “David has it every year.”

“I don’t think you feel so very bad,” said Barbara. “You’ve been so much better lately. And you’ll have to make up all the lessons that you miss, you know.”

“Wish I didn’t have to go to school,” said David, in a petulant voice that was most unusual with him; “I hate it.”

“I can’t understand why you don’t like to study when you so love to read,” remarked Barbara. “You ought to do much better work in school; you’re not a bit stupid at home.”

“I have ideas in my head,” said David, plaintively. “But when I get them out, they aren’t ideas.”

“You do too much dreaming and too little studying. I can’t pull you away from books at home, but you don’t seem to be able to concentrate your mind on your school work.”

“Lessons are so unint’resting,” said David. “If I was in history or mythology, now, I’d like those; but I only have reading and ’rithmetic and language and g’ography. I’ve read everything in my reader a million times, and every time we come to a beauteous sentence in our language lesson we have to chop it up into old parts of speech. I can’t do numbers at all, and I just hate g’ography!”

“You like to read it at home.”

“Yes, but that’s diff’runt. I always read about the people, and the animals, and what’s in the country, and what the inhabitants do, and how they live. But at school they make you tell all the mountain ranges from the northeast to the southwest of Asia, and the names are awful hard to learn. They’re just like eight times seven, and seven times nine: there doesn’t seem to be anything to make you remember them, but there’s a whole lot of things to make you forget them!”

“Wait until you get into fractions,” said Gassy. “Then you’ll see! ’Rithmetic is just planned to keep you guessing. When I was beginning addition, I thought that was all there was to learn, but afterwards I found that I’d only learned it so I could do subtraction. Everything you find out about just makes more things for you to study. I wish I’d stayed with my mind a blank,—like the Everett baby.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Jack, consolingly. “You haven’t strayed so far from that condition that you can’t find your way back.”

There was a crackle of stiff white apron, a flash of thin, black legs, and Whiting’s Language Lessons went sailing through the air, its pages falling as it struck Jack’s head.

“Now see what you’ve done, Spitfire!” said Jack.

Two months before, this exhibition of temper would have been made the subject of a moral lecture from Barbara. Now she only looked sober as she bent to help Gassy pick up the leaves. “Poor book,” she said; “you’ve given it what Jack deserved. That’s hardly fair, is it? Come, Boy, help repair the damage that you caused. No, David, you needn’t help; I want you to go and get ready for school.”

“Must I?” pleaded David.

“I think you had better.”

The little boy raised himself from the couch with a long-drawn sigh that Barbara remembered days afterward. “All right, if you say so,” he said: “I’ll change my waist now.”

The house seemed very still after the children had trooped out to swell the procession of young people headed toward the school. Barbara reflected with relief that their departure would lighten her labors. With the Kid at kindergarten, and the others away from home, she could count on a tidy house and an unbroken opportunity for work.

“It doesn’t seem very affectionate to be glad that they are gone,” she said to herself. “Mother always seemed to be sorry when our vacation was over. But it is a relief to have a quiet house, and a chance to work without a dozen interruptions an hour. Perhaps, after I get things into running order, I shall have time to do a little writing every morning while they are out of the way. Then—”

The thought of the pile of rejected manuscripts lying upstairs in the corner of her desk stopped her dreams. “I can’t even write any more,” she thought bitterly. “This kitchen drudgery takes the life out of my brain as well as my body. I must find time to put the early morning freshness into something besides dishes.”

It was with this idea that she carried a writing-pad and her fountain pen out to the side porch an hour later. An orderly house and an undistracted mind seemed to make conditions favorable for writing, and the scanty bits of philosophy that had sifted their way into the gayeties of the past fortnight began to find utterance in best college rhetoric. The lust of writing stole over the girl, and for two hours she wrote steadily, utterly oblivious to everything.

The sound of the opening of the gate roused her. It was Jack, coming up the gravel walk with David in his arms,—an inert little David, whose arm hung heavily over his brother’s, and whose hand swung limply at the end. The fountain pen rolled unheeded off the porch.

“What is it?” breathed Barbara.

“Where’s father?” asked Jack.

“Gone to see the Wemott baby. What’s the matter with David?”

“I wish I knew,” said Jack, hoarsely. “He’s sick, though. Call father by ’phone, and then help me to get him to bed. I’ll tell you about it when you come upstairs.”

Barbara’s heart stood still, but her feet flew. “Wemott’s residence,” she said at the telephone. “Oh, I don’t know the number, Central; hurry, please, do hurry!”

It seemed hours before the answer came. “Is Dr. Grafton still there?... No, don’t call him.... Tell him to come home at once.” Even in her excitement she found thought to add the words that should save him ten minutes of worry,—“There has been a hurry call.”

The limp little body lay stretched out on David’s bed. “I can’t find his night-shirt,” said Jack, in the same hoarse voice. “Where do you keep it, Barbara? He was taken sick at school. Bob Needham came running over to the High School to tell me to come at once,—that David was acting strangely. By the time I got there, he was lying just like this across one of the recitation benches, and his teacher was trying to make him swallow a little brandy. She told me that she had noticed that he was not himself during a recitation; he began to talk loudly and rather wildly, and to insist that his head did ache; that”—Jack seemed to force out the words—“that it wasn’t the nine o’clock disease. She tried to quiet him, and had just succeeded in getting him to agree to go home, when he toppled over on the floor. Don’t wait to unfasten that shoe-string, Barbara; cut it. Of course I brought him right home. Willowby’s driver was just passing the school, and I hailed him. When will father be here?”

Between the disjointed sentences brother and sister put the sick child to bed. Then Jack hurried to call Dr. Curtis by telephone, while Barbara hovered over the still form until her father’s step was heard on the stair. In the ten minutes’ interval the girl learned what four years of college had failed to teach,—the hardest lesson that Time brings to Youth,—how to wait.

The two physicians arrived almost simultaneously. Then Barbara and Jack were sent downstairs on errands that both felt were manufactured for the occasion. When they came back, the bedroom door was shut and they sat down in the hall outside, silent and aloof, and yet drawn together by the same fear which struggled at each heart. After what seemed to be hours, the door opened, and Dr. Curtis came out. Two white faces questioned his.

“Probably brain fever,” said the doctor. “We hope that it won’t be very serious,—if we’ve caught it in time. Jack, you come along to the drug-store with me. Miss Barbara, you might go in and see your father now.”

But the girl had not waited for his instructions, to push past him into the bedroom. Dr. Grafton stood looking down at the little figure outlined by the bed-clothes. He turned as Barbara came in, and the girl received no encouragement from his face. When he spoke, however, it was reassuringly. “Come in, Barbara; you can’t disturb him now. He’s had some medicine, and he won’t rouse for some time. I want to talk with you.”

“Is he dangerously sick?”

“We can’t tell just how sick he is, but we won’t think about danger yet. His fever is pretty high. Has he complained about not feeling well lately?”

“Not until this morning, and then not much. David never does really complain. He wanted to stay away from school, though.”

“He ought never to have gone,” said her father.

Barbara winced as though she had been struck. “That was my fault, father; I told him that I thought he had better go.”

Dr. Grafton did not seem to hear. “I’ve been trying to think what is the best thing for us to do. I don’t dare to let your mother know yet. I’ve sent for a nurse for the boy, but it’s going to make extra care for you to have sickness in the house. I don’t know just what we’ll do with the children; we must try to find some haven for Cecilia and the Kid. You and Jack and I must hold the fort. Do you think we can manage it? It may be a long siege.”

Barbara’s eyes overflowed, but her voice was steady as she answered her father with a slang phrase that seemed, somehow, to carry more assurance with it than college English would have done,—“Sure thing!”

“That’s all, then. The nurse will be here in twenty minutes. Try to keep the children still when they get home from school. I know that I can depend on you to keep things running, downstairs.”

“Yes, father.”

News traveled fast in Auburn, and before the children had returned from school, two visitors had cleared some of the difficulties from Barbara’s path. The first was Mrs. Willowby, who stopped at the door to tell Barbara that Gassy and the Kid were to be provided with a temporary home. “I am on my way to school now,” she said; “and I’ll explain it to them, and will take them home with me this noon. If you can get together what clothing they will need, I’ll send Michael over for it this afternoon. You know what a happiness it will be to me to do anything for your mother’s children, and I’ll try to mother them enough to keep them contented. In the mean time, dear, we are all at your service.”

As Mrs. Willowby’s carriage left the door, Susan came hurrying up the walk, a covered plate in her hand, and her face alive with sympathy. She caught Barbara’s face and drew it down to her own, using the childish name for her which had been dropped since college days. “Dear old Bobby,” she said. “I’ve just heard about.”

Barbara’s face relaxed and the tears began to gather.

“I’ve come to stay,” said Susan, in a practical voice, which brought more relief than pity would have done. “That is, to stay as long as you need me. David may be all right in a day or two, and then I’ll only be in the way. But in the mean time, I’m going to be Bridget.”

“Oh, no,” protested Barbara.

“Oh, yes,” mocked Susan. “You’ll have enough on your hands with all the extra cares, let alone the cooking. You must save a part of yourself for David, if he needs you. I don’t expect to do as well as you have been doing, if Auburn gossip is to be trusted, but I shan’t poison your family during your absence from the kitchen.”

“I can’t let you do it,” said Barbara. “You ought not to take so much time away from home. What would your family do without you?”

“I have them trained so that they could get along without me for a year,” answered Susan. “Brother Frank is as handy about the kitchen as a woman, and he is not at work, now. Besides, I shan’t be away all the time; I shall run back and forth, enough to have my fingers in both pies. And speaking of pie, Barbara, here is a cherry one that I had standing idle in my pantry; I felt sure that you hadn’t made any dessert, yet.”

Barbara took the plate unsteadily. The two girls seemed to have changed natures, and something of Susan’s former stiffness had fallen upon Barbara. Of the two, Susan was far more at ease. “But I can’t take favors from you,—now,” said Barbara, awkwardly, “after what—”

“Look here, Barbara Grafton,” answered Susan. “You’ve always been doing favors for me,—all your life,—favors that I couldn’t return. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but that I didn’t know how. You could always do things,—write, and draw, and sing, and entertain, and teach,—and I’ve reaped the benefit. Don’t you suppose I’ve ever wished that I could return the favors? Now there’s only one thing in all this world that I can do for you, and that is cook. Do you mean to say that you’re not going to let me do it?”

Over the little brown pie the two girls clasped hands. “Where do you keep your potatoes?” said Susan. “It’s so late that I’ll have to boil them.”

Somehow the long hours of the day dragged by, and ten o’clock at night found Barbara in her room.

“Go to bed, now,” her father had said. “David’s stupor will last all night, and I want you to be ready for to-morrow, when we shall need you. Miss Graves can take care of him better than either of us, just now. Our turn will come later.”

It was hard to stay in the sick-room, where the deathly silence was broken only by the little invalid’s heavy breathing and the swish of Miss Graves’s stiffly starched petticoats; harder still to go away, beyond these sounds. Barbara went reluctantly, dreading the long night when hands must lie idle, and feet still. Jack, too, had decided to “turn in early,” and the house seemed very silent without the usual uproar of the children’s bedtime. She had just fallen into an uneasy sleep, when she was roused by a step upon the stair. In a moment she was wide awake. Was it her father with bad news, or Miss Graves in search of something? By the familiar squeak Barbara knew that the top stair had been reached. The step sounded in the hallway, and the girl sat up in bed as her door was pushed open and a shadowy little figure entered the room.

“Cecilia Grafton!” exclaimed Barbara.

Gassy tiptoed toward the bed. “How’s David?” she demanded, in a whisper.

“How on earth did you get here?”

“Walked. How’s David?”

“Just about the same. Father says he is not suffering any pain. Did you come alone at this time of night?”

“Yes,” said Gassy, defiantly, “I did. Mrs. Willowby thought we ought to go to bed early. So we did. She let me sleep in the rose room, only I couldn’t. Mr. Willowby went to bed early, too, in the room just across the hall, and he snored awful. I stayed awake about two hours. I knew I couldn’t get to sleep unless I knew, myself, how David was, so I dressed and came. Is he going to be awful sick, Barbara? Tell me the truth; please don’t fool me!” A pair of cold little hands found their way to Barbara’s shoulders.

“We hope not, dear.”

“I wish I could sleep here to-night. I hate to be sent away.”

“But Mrs. Willowby will worry, if she finds that you have gone.”

“Can’t you telephone her that I’m here? I’ll go back to-morrow, Barbara, and I’ll be awful good if you’ll just let me sleep with you to-night. I always thought heaven was like that rose room, but I can’t sleep in it. Please let me stay here.”

Barbara slipped on her bath-robe and tiptoed down to the telephone. All was quiet in the sick-room as she passed. When she reached her own chamber, Gassy was cuddled down between the sheets. She snuggled close to her older sister with a little sob. “Even rose rooms can’t keep you from worrying, can they?” she said.

In the three weeks that followed, Barbara discovered that nothing can “keep you from worrying” when the dark shadow that men call Dread of Death stands on the threshold. She marveled constantly that one frail little body could withstand such desperate onslaughts of fever and pain. David’s illness was quick of development: the drowsiness was followed by days of high fever, and these were succeeded by nights of unconsciousness which plainly showed the strain to which the little frame was being subjected. He wasted greatly under the suffering, and although her father and Dr. Curtis said, “About the same,” each day, it seemed to Barbara’s eyes that the little brother grew less human and more shadowy with every succeeding twenty-four hours. Mrs. Grafton had not been told, both physicians deciding that the shock might cause a relapse, and Barbara’s hardest duty was to keep the news from her mother. In the cheery letters that continued to go to the sanitarium at regular intervals, there was not a word of the tragedy at home, but the writing was more of a strain than the watching in the sick-room.

As Dr. Grafton had predicted to Barbara, her turn came later. David took a most unaccountable dislike to Miss Graves, whose devotion to starch was the only thing in her disfavor, and he objected to her presence in the sick-room with the unreasoning vehemence of the delirious. It was impossible to dismiss Miss Graves without some valid excuse, and equally impossible to secure another nurse in Auburn. So most of the care devolved upon Barbara, much to David’s satisfaction, for he called constantly for his sister, and seemed most contented when her hands smoothed the hot pillow or gave the sleeping-draught.

To the management of the housework, Barbara gave little thought. Meals were scarcely an incident in those days of waiting. Little by little, as conditions grew graver in the invalid’s room, Barbara gave up more and more of her household duties, yet she was vaguely aware that things went on like clockwork downstairs. The meals that appeared upon the table were delicious, and yet Susan’s part in them was not obvious. She slipped in and out of the house at all hours, always bringing comfort with her, and yet bestowing it so quietly that it seemed the gift of a beneficent fairy.

Every critical thing that Barbara had ever said of the provincialism and officiousness of Auburn folk came back to her during these days of trouble. When Mrs. Willowby came with advice or encouragement, when the Enderby children brought home David’s school-books, when Miss Pettibone came running “across lots” with beef tea or a plate of doughnuts, when Mr. Ritter pressed his telephone into service, and agreed to carry all messages, that the sick child might not be disturbed, when even Miss Bates stopped at the door to inquire affectionately about the invalid, and when all the town combined to keep the news from Mrs. Grafton, Barbara’s conscience was stricken. Her heart warmed with gratitude, and the meaning of the word neighborliness was, for the first time, made clear to her.

And yet, with all the kindliness and helpfulness that Auburn could bestow, there was plenty left for the girl to do. It was Barbara who answered the door, who took the messages, who encouraged the children, who cheered Jack, who comforted her father, who assisted the nurse, who was brave when conditions were most discouraging, and sunny when the clouds hung lowest. And it was Barbara, too, who sat beside the bed, ready to rub the aching side or smooth the feverish brow, and who met, with a sinking heart, the discouragement that each day brought.

It was the middle of October before the crisis came. An early frost had stripped the flower beds, withered the vines, and left the yard bare. Barbara, looking out of the window through a blur of rain, on the day when David’s fever was highest, was vaguely relieved by the desolation outside. Sunshine out of doors would have been a mockery. She stood with her back toward the bed and her face toward the street, but her eyes saw nothing but the wasted little form that tossed restlessly to and fro, and her ears heard only the heavy breathing, broken, now and then, by a moan. Miss Graves had gone to get a few hours’ sleep to fortify herself for the vigil of the night, and Dr. Grafton, in the next room, was consulting with Dr. Curtis. The house was so still that their low voices were plainly audible. The words were not distinct, but the discouraged note in her father’s speech fell heavily upon the girl’s heart. “They are afraid,” she said to herself.

She turned from the desolate window to the bed, and with pale lips and dry eyes gazed down at the little brother. David tossed restlessly upon his pillow, and called aloud for Barbara.

“I’m here, dear,” said the girl, taking the small, hot hand in hers; but the boy flung it away with a strange strength.

“I want Barbara,” he cried.

At the sound of the hoarse voice, Dr. Grafton hurried back into the room, followed by Dr. Curtis. And then began a fight with death that Barbara never forgot. Pushed aside as merely an onlooker, the girl watched, with a sort of curiosity, the man that she saw for the first time in her life. The father she had always known had vanished; in his place was the skilled physician, who seemed to have thought for the patient rather than the son. The two doctors worked like one machine,—fighting the fever back step by step, beating it, choking it, quenching it; pitting against it strength and science and skill. And when it finally succumbed, and David was snatched from the burning, a poor little wasted wraith of life, Barbara understood the worship that Dr. Grafton’s patients gave him.

“We’ve won out,” he said. “The fever’s left the boy. Now if we can only keep him alive to-night—”

The shadows of evening were heavy in the room as Miss Graves’s starchiness sounded along the hall. She went at once to the bedside, and laid her hand on the boy’s forehead. Then she looked quickly up at the doctor. In that glance Barbara read the whole story,—it was a question, now, of vitality.

Susan herself brought up the tray of supper to Barbara, who tried to eat it in order to seem appreciative. But the rolls and the creamed chicken were sent back untasted, and she could not even find words to reply to the unworded sympathy in Susan’s good-night. The old habit of gesture comes back in times of deepest emotion, and both girls understood, without need of words, Susan’s reassuring pat of the shoulder, and Barbara’s tight grasp of the hand.

“Go to bed, children,” said Dr. Grafton, as he came out of the sick-room to the hall where Barbara and Jack stood together. “We need absolute quiet and plenty of air for the boy. There’ll be no change for several hours, and you want all the sleep you can get.”

“I can’t sleep,” protested Jack.

“But you can rest, and you must do it,” answered his father. “We may need you both—later.”

“You’ll call us,” said Jack, “if—”

“Yes,” said his father, “I will.”

Jack turned, without a word, to his own room, and Barbara heard him throw himself on the bed with a half-stifled moan. She herself opened her bedroom door and went in. Sleep was out of the question. She fell upon her knees beside her couch and prayed,—an inarticulate, broken cry for the help that is beyond human power. Then she lighted her little night lamp, and sat down before her desk with a volume of Emerson in her hand. She turned to the essay on Compensation, and read, her eyes seeking and finding the detached sentences that seemed written for her:—

Barbara dropped the book hastily. “There’s no compensation in that!” she said bitterly. Then she picked up a bit of paper, and put the cry of her heart into a few crude words.

Her father, coming into the room two hours later, found her there at her desk, her tear-stained face bowed on her arms. The pencil was still in her hand. Dr. Grafton touched her shoulder gently, but the girl did not waken. He hesitated for a moment, hoping for the right words to tell her, and as he did so his eyes fell upon the crumpled paper before him. It read:—

The doctor’s eyes filled. “Thank God,” he said, “she won’t have to be, this time!”