that. You had a bad fall yesterday; but you have slept so well all night——”{10}
{10}
“Oh no—I think not,” protested Kate; and then it suddenly occurred to her how ungrateful she was. “I am sure you were sitting up with me,” she said. “It is so very good of you; and I don’t even know—my head is so strange.”
“You shall hear all about it in time,” said her cheerful nurse. “You have only to keep quiet, that is all, and take some tea, and be content to be an invalid. Is that hard? But it might have been so much worse; and oh! we have such reason to be thankful, my dear!”
Kate did not say anything, but she gazed so, throwing all her awe-stricken thoughts into her eyes, that the kind woman answered the thought as if it had been spoken.
“Yes, you might have been killed—and my John too. Thank God, you are both safe! But you must not ask any more questions. You must let me settle your pillows for you, and try to take some tea.”
“My John!” who was that? another mysterious new being in this world of darkness. Kate gazed imploringly at her new frie{11}nd, whom she had identified and made out. But Mrs Mitford’s attention was fixed on the pillows, which she piled up cunningly behind the patient to support her. “Is that comfortable?” she asked. “It does not make you giddy to sit up like that? and here is your breakfast, and a rose with the dew on it from my—from the garden,” she added, after a little momentary pause. Kate’s mind was very much confused, it is true, but still her woman’s wit had not so much deserted her but that she could make out that broken sentence. It was “my John,” no doubt, that her friend had been about to say, and why then could not she say it without hesitation? An involuntary smile stole over Kate’s face; she put up the rose to hide this smile, taking in all its freshness and dewiness and perfume into her young being. Evidently John was not without discrimination—and Kate, we are obliged to confess, was the kind of girl to like the rose all the better coming to her in this half-mysterious way, than if Mrs Mitford had but gathered it in the garden as she took her morning walk.
{11}
{12}
{12}
“It is very sweet; and it is so kind of—you, to bring it me,” said Kate, with a little gleam of habitual mischief waking in her pretty eyes. “But oh! my head feels so
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