“It seems a long time since I began to lie here.  I am afraid it will be many months before I get well again.  I think I shall resign myself to proper invalids’ fashions.  I will have some pretty lace caps, Laura, and we will have more books.”  Then a wistful expression crossed her face and she said:  “I would give anything on earth to walk, even only for ten minutes, by the side of the river; as I lie here I think so much about it.  I know it in all its moods—­when the wind hurries it and the little wavelets dash along; when the tide is deep and the water overflows among the reeds and grasses; when it is still and silent and the shadows of the stars lie on it, and when the sun turns it into a stream of living gold, I know it well.”

“You will see it again soon,” said my father, in a broken voice.  “I will drive you down any time you like.”

But my mother said nothing.  I think she had seen the tears in Sir Roland’s eyes.  From that day she seemed to grow more reconciled to her lot.  Now let me add a tribute to my father.  His devotion to her was something marvelous; he seemed to love her better in her helpless state than he had done when she was full of health and spirits.  I admired him so much for it during the first year of my mother’s illness.  He never left her.  Hunting, shooting, fishing, dinner parties, everything was given up that he might sit with her.

One of the drawing rooms, a beautiful, lofty apartment looking over the park to the hills beyond, was arranged as my mother’s room; there all that she loved best was taken.

The one next to it was made into a sleeping room for her, so that she should never have to be carried up and down stairs.  A room for her maid came next.  And my father had a door so placed that the chair could be wheeled from the rooms through the glass doors into the grounds.

“You think, then,” she said, “that I shall not grow well just yet, Roland?”

“No, my darling, not just yet,” he replied.

What words of mine could ever describe what that sick room became?  It was a paradise of beautiful flowers, singing birds, little fragrant fountains and all that was most lovely.  After a time visitors came, and my mother saw them; the poor came, and she consoled them.

“My lady” was with them once more, never more to walk into their cottages and look at the rosy children.  They came to her now, and that room became a haven of refuge.

So it went on for three years, and I woke up one morning to find it was my thirteenth birthday.

CHAPTER V.

That day both my parents awoke to the fact that I must have more education.  I could not go to school; to have taken me from my mother would have been death to both of us.  They had a long conversation, and it was decided that the wisest plan would be for me to have a governess—­a lady who would at the same time be a companion to my mother.  I am quite sure that at first she did not like it, but afterward she turned to my father, with a sweet, loving smile.