They will not let me go downstairs at all to-day.
I have been lying looking at the fire, alone, for Francis returned with Mrs. Granton and Penelope yesterday. They have gone a long walk across the moors. I watched them, strolling arm-in-arm--Darby and Joan fashion--till their two small black figures vanished over the hilly road, which always used to remind me of the Sleeping Beauty and her prince.=
````And round her waist she felt it fold,
````To that new world which is the old."=
They must be very happy--Francis and Penelope. '
I wonder how soon I shall be well. This fever and ague lasts sometimes for months; I remember Doctor Urquhart's once saying so.
Here, following my plan of keeping this journal accurate and complete, I ought to put down something which occurred yesterday, and which concerns Doctor Urquhart.
Driving through the camp, my sister Penelope saw him, and papa stopped the carriage and waited for him. He could not pass them by, as Francis declared he seemed intending to do, with a mere salutation, but stayed and spoke. The conversation was not told me, for, on mentioning it, a few sharp words took place between papa and Penelope. She protested against his taking; so much trouble in cultivating the society of a man, who, she said, was evidently, out of his own profession, “a perfect boor.”
Papa replied more warmly than I had at all expected.
“You will oblige me, Penelope, by allowing your father to have a will of his own in this as in most other matters, even if you do suppose him capable of choosing for his associate and friend 'a perfect boor.' And were that accusation as true as it is false, I trust I should never forget that a debt of gratitude, such as I owe to Doctor Urquhart, once incurred, is seldom to be repaid, and never to be obliterated.”
So the discourse ended. Penelope left my room, and papa took a chair by me. I tried to talk to him, but we soon both fell into silence. Once or twice, when I thought he was reading the newspaper, I found him looking at me, but he made no remark.
Papa and I have had much less of each other's company lately, though we have never lost the pleasant footing on which we learned to be during his illness. I wonder if, now that he is quite well, he has any recollection of the long, long hours, nights and days, with only daylight or candle-light to mark the difference between them, when he lay motionless in his bed, watched and nursed by us two.
