It was cold and
Henrietta shivered, and once again she wished she could sit by a
fireside with some one who was kind and tender; but to-night there
would only be Aunt Sophia and Aunt Rose sitting with her in that
drawing-room, where everything was too elegant and too clear, where
now no one ever laughed.
11
They sat by the fire as she had foreseen, Sophia pretending to be busy
with her embroidery, Rose, in a straight-backed chair, reading a book.
Henrietta sat on a low stool with a book open on her knee, but she did
not read it. The fire talked to itself, said silly things and
chuckled, or murmured sentimentally. That chatter, vaguely insane, and
the turning of Rose's pages, the drawing of Sophia's silks through the
stuff and the click of her scissors, were the only sounds until,
suddenly, Sophia gave a groan and fell back in her chair. Rose, very
much startled, glanced at Henrietta and jumped up.
'It's her heart,' Henrietta said with the superiority of her
knowledge. 'I'll get her medicine.' She came back with it. 'She was
like this when Aunt Caroline died, but I promised not to tell. If she
has this she will be better.'
It was Henrietta who poured the liquid into the glass and applied it
to Sophia's lips. She was, she felt, the practical person, and it was
she, and not Aunt Rose, who had been trusted by Aunt Sophia. 'She
told me where she kept the stuff,' Henrietta continued calmly. 'There,
that's better.
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