“I fear,” said her mother, anxiously watching the earnest, delicately tinted face upturned to hers, “I fear he is very badly wounded.”
“Oh!” said Easter, and she looked very grave.
“Be as happy as you can, my precious,” her mother called to her as she drove away. “I’ll get home as early as possible.”
For one thing, it rained all the morning; for another, her father had to go a long way off on business connected with special constables, and couldn’t take her; and Amelia, the usually cheerful housemaid, went about the house with red eyes and a perpetual sniff, because she had heard that morning she’d lost a cousin in the “big push on the Somme.”
Easter knitted a few rows of her scarf--the scarf that was always begun by her and finished by somebody else because she got tired of it. She found she was missing Chris far more poignantly than was at all pleasant.
After all, even if he didn’t always quite give in to her, he was good company; and Easter found herself remembering many kind things he had done. The chocolates he had always shared so generously, the apples so unequally divided always in her favor. Once when she fell off a wall and scratched her hands and tore her frock so badly, he hadn’t laughed, and he was so seldom rough in play, only when unbearably provoked. Easter was too honest not to admit that even at the time.
It cleared up in the afternoon and she ran over to the Denvers’ house to see if Chris was up yet and could play.
Emma, the parlormaid, was firm in her refusal to admit Easter.
“Master Chris is that bad, so feverish it might turn to anything, the doctor says. Miss Radley said no one was to come in, and she haven’t left Master Chris a single minute herself. It’s dreadful, and us all in such trouble about the major, too.”
“You haven’t lost him, have you?” Easter asked.
“Good gracious! no, not yet, so far as we knows. But he’s as bad as bad, and,” she added, “if anything was to happen to Master Chris and his ma away an’ all--but, there! I can’t bear to think of it. You run along home, Miss Easter. I’ll tell Miss Radley you came to ask.”
Next day the news was no better. Even Easter’s mother could not keep from her the universal anxiety as to Major Denver. He had been their doctor for a year before the war, and in that time had managed to endear himself to everybody.