Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/190

 that queer far-off look that his face sometimes wore. Turning at last he met Dick’s anxious eyes and smiled slowly and happily.

“It was just a year ago we quarreled,” he said. “I thought he should have stood by me when I wanted to build the road; he thought, like the rest,  that I was a mad dreamer—perhaps I was. This war has overturned all things; what was a far  vision once may be what the world most needs  to-day. But your brother is a better friend than I, Dick Edmonds. I could not have been the first to say that I was wrong. And now all is well again.”

The next day and the next, John Edmonds’ fever ebbed and flowed, leaving them sometimes  full of hope that recovery was beginning, sometimes in terror that such recovery might never  be. In the end, however, the crisis passed, leaving him pale and shaky, but clear-headed and himself again at last. It was on the first day that he was able to be propped up in bed that Oscar, sitting by him, began to discuss, with unreserved  bluntness, what was being said in Rudolm about