I was just childish and weak enough from my illness to be a trifle chagrined at being so left out, and I am afraid my chagrin amounted almost to sulkiness sometimes.  Lillian and Katherine, however, appeared to notice nothing, and their mysterious conferences increased in number as the days went on.

There came a day at last when my morbidness had increased to such an extent that I felt there was nothing more in the world for me, and that there was no one to care what became of me.  I was huddled in one of Lillian’s big chairs before the fireplace in the living room, drearily watching the flames, through eyes almost too dim with tears to see them.  I could hear the murmur of voices in the hall, where Katherine and Lillian had been standing ever since Katherine’s arrival, a few minutes before.  Then the voices grew louder, there was a rush of feet to the door, a “Hush!” from Lillian, and then, pale, emaciated, showing the effects of the terrible ordeal through which he had gone, my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, who, until Katherine came home, I had thought was dead, stood before me.

“Oh!  Jack, Jack.  Thank God!  Thank God!”

As I saw my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, whom I had so long mourned as dead, coming toward me in Lillian Underwood’s living room, I stumbled to my feet, and, with no thought of spectators, or of anything save the fact that the best friend I had ever known had come back to me, I rushed into his arms, and clung to him wildly, sobbing out all the heartache and terror that had been mine since Dicky had left me in so cruel and mysterious a manner.

I felt as a little child might that had been lost and suddenly caught sight of its father or mother.  The awful burden that had been mine lifted at the very sight of Jack’s pale face smiling down at me.  I knew that someway, somehow, Jack would straighten everything out for me.

“There, there, Margaret.”  Jack’s well-remembered tones, huskier, weaker by far than when I had last heard them, soothed me, calmed me.  “Everything’s going to come out all right.  I’ll see to it all.  Sit down, and let me hear all about it.”

There was an indefinable air of embarrassment about him which I could not understand at first.  Then I saw beyond him the lovely flushed face of Katharine Sonnot, and in her eyes there was a faintly troubled look.

I read it all in a flash.  Jack was embarrassed because I had so impetuously embraced him before Katherine.  I withdrew myself from his embrace abruptly, and drew a chair for him near my own.

“Are you sure you are fully recovered?” I asked, and I saw Jack look wonderingly at the touch of formality in my tone.

“No, I cannot say that,” he returned gravely, “but I am so much better off than so many of the other poor chaps who survived, that I have no right to complain.  Mine was a body wound, and while I shall feel its effects on my general health for years, perhaps all my life, yet I am not crippled.”