Here's a piece of pie for you."  He looked at his watch and added in a perfunctory way, "You shouldn't have walled him in." 

 "I ought to have given you a Rosary," said Father McGowan. He still looked guilty, but happily so. Cecilia stood before a mirror, looking at a dainty little chain and pendant, which she'd clasped about her throat. 

 "I know you ought, Father McGowan, dear," she answered, "but I'm so glad you didn't! It's so beautiful!" 

 She gasped happily. Father McGowan smiled.  "Papa gave me one," she said.  "It—it is, that is, I love it, but I'll wear this more."  She looked into Father McGowan's understanding eyes. 

 "I am learning," she said, "but I learned things before I went to school that I shall never forget, and that I never want to forget." 

 Jeremiah came in. 

 "You give her that?" he asked in a pleased voice.  "Well! But have you saw the one I give her? Three hunderd dollars! Get it, Celie, and then play us 'The Shepherd Boy.'"  Celie vanished. 

 White-clad nurses flitted about the halls of Jeremiah Madden's house.  There was a dead silence, and upstairs that druggy-sick smell. 

 Cecilia had been very ill. She was better, but still sick enough to keep Jeremiah anxious. He hovered about the house almost forgetting bricks, and wearing a collar all the time, as he did on Sundays. It had begun with a cold, then a cough, which (through Celia's standing on the curb, better to view a gentleman down the street who was interestingly drunk) had turned to pneumonia on both sides. 

 She had gone to bed protesting that she felt very well, but that her breath was not acting quite right. Then she had grown so very, very sick that she had forgotten time, life and even Jeremiah of the bricks. 

 Those days had been rather dreadful for Jeremiah.... He had taken to sitting just outside her door on a very upright chair. He turned the pages of "Ridpath's History of the World."  He was trying to "educate himself up to Celie." ... However, he missed a great many of the pictures and only got as far as Volume One. 

 Each time a trim nurse would step from Cecilia's door, he would cough to get his voice in shape, and then whisper gratingly: "Excuse me, Missis, but how is she?" 

 Prev. P 39/121 next