She had not given a thought to the chair or to the changes—­had not even noticed them.  That the room was stripped of its furniture prior to a long stay was what invariably occurred in her own house every summer:  it was her precious uncle’s pale, shrunken face and the blue veins that showed in the backs of his dear transparent hands which she held between her own, and the thin, emaciated wrists that absorbed her.

“You poor, dear Uncle George!” she purred—­“and nobody to look after you.”  He had drawn up Pawson’s chair and had placed her in it beside the one he sat in, and had then dropped slowly into his own, the better to hide from her his weakness—­but it did not deceive her.  “I’m going to have you put back to bed this very minute; you are not strong enough to sit up.  Let me call Aunt Jemima.”

St. George shook his head good-naturedly in denial and smoothed her hands with his fingers.

“Call nobody and do nothing but sit beside me and let me look into your face and listen to your voice.  I have been pretty badly shaken up; had two weeks of it that couldn’t have been much worse—­but since then I have been on the mend and am getting stronger every minute.  I haven’t had any medicine and I don’t want any now—­I just want you and—­” he hesitated, and seeing nothing in her eyes of any future hope for Harry, finished the sentence, with “and one or two others to sit by me and cheer me up; that’s better than all the doctors in the, world.  And now, first about your father and then about yourself.”

“Oh, he’s very well,” she rejoined absently.  “He’s off somewhere, went away two days ago.  He’ll be back in a week.  But you must have something to eat—­good things!”—­her mind still occupied with his condition.  “I’m going to have some chicken broth made the moment I get home and it will be sent fresh every day:  and you must eat every bit of it!”

Again St. George’s laugh rang out.  He had let her run on—­it was music to his ears—­that he might later on find some clue on which he could frame a question he had been revolving in his mind ever since he heard her voice in the hall.  He would not tell her about Harry—­better wait until he could read her thoughts the clearer.  If he could discover by some roundabout way that she would still refuse to see him it would be best not to embarrass her with any such request; especially on this her first visit.

“Yes—­I’ll eat anything and everything you send me, you dear Kate—­and many thanks to you, provided you’ll come with it—­you are the best broth for me.  But you haven’t answered my question—­not all of it.  What have you been doing since I left?”

“Wondering whether you would forgive me for the rude way in which I left you the last time I saw you,—­the night of Mr. Horn’s reading, for one thing.  I went off with Mr. Willits and never said a word to you.  I wrote you a letter telling you how sorry I was, but you never answered it, and that made me more anxious than ever.”