All this time—­for you are making your visit a very long one, so that autumn has come, and the nights are growing cool, and Jenny and yourself are transferring your little coquetries to the chimney-corner—­poor Charlie lies sick at home.  Boyhood, thank Heaven! does not suffer severely from sympathy when the object is remote.  And those letters from the mother, telling you that Charlie cannot play,—­cannot talk even as he used to do,—­and that perhaps his “Heavenly Father will take him away to be with him in the better world,” disturb you for a time only.  Sometimes however they come back to your thought on a wakeful night, and you dream about his suffering, and think—­why it is not you, but Charlie, who is sick?  The thought puzzles you; and well it may, for in it lies the whole mystery of our fate.

Those letters grow more and more discouraging, and the kind admonitions of your mother grow more earnest, as if (though the thought does not come to you until years afterward) she was preparing herself to fasten upon you that surplus of affection which she fears may soon be withdrawn forever from the sick child.

It is on a frosty, bleak evening, when you are playing with Nat, that the letter reaches you which says Charlie is growing worse, and that you must come to your home.  It makes a dreamy night for you—­fancying how Charlie will look, and if sickness has altered him much, and if he will not be well by Christmas.  From this you fall away in your reverie to the odd old house and its secret cupboards, and your aunt’s queer caps; then come up those black eyes of “your attached Jenny,” and you think it a pity that she is six month’s older than you; and again—­as you recall one of her sighs—­you think that six months are not much after all!

You bid her good-bye, with a little sentiment swelling in your throat, and are mortally afraid Nat will see your lip tremble.  Of course you promise to write, and squeeze her hand with an honesty you do not think of doubting—­for weeks.

It is a dull, cold ride, that day, for you.  The winds sweep over the withered cornfields with a harsh, chilly whistle, and the surfaces of the little pools by the roadside are tossed up into cold blue wrinkles of water.  Here and there a flock of quail, with their feathers ruffled in the autumn gusts, tread through the hard, dry stubble of an oatfield; or, startled by the snap of the driver’s whip, they stare a moment at the coach, then whir away down the cold current of the wind.  The blue jays scream from the roadside oaks, and the last of the blue and purple asters shiver along the wall.  And as the sun sinks, reddening all the western clouds to the color of the frosted maples, light lines of the Aurora gush up from the northern hills, and trail their splintered fingers far over the autumn sky.

It is quite dark when you reach home, but you see the bright reflection of a fire within, and presently at the open door Nelly clapping her hands for welcome.  But there are sad faces when you enter.  Your mother folds you to her heart; but at your first noisy outburst of joy puts her finger on her lip, and whispers poor Charlie’s name.  The Doctor you see too, slipping softly out of the bedroom-door, with glasses in his hand; and—­you hardly know how—­your spirits grow sad, and your heart gravitates to the heavy air of all about you.