Page:Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920).djvu/250

218 ever. The boy at the window stopped whistling, and the girl silently wiped her eyes on her faded gingham apron.

Naomi drew her own hair over her lips, and kissed it.

“You'll never have hair like that, Eunice,” she said. “It does seem most too pretty to bury, doesn’t it? Mind you see that it is fixed nice when I’m laid out. Comb it right up on my head and braid it there.”

A sound, such as might be wrung from a suffering animal, came from the girl, but at the same moment the door opened and a woman entered.

“Chris,” she said sharply, “you get right off for the cows, you lazy little scamp! You knew right well you had to go for them, and here you’ve been idling, and me looking high and low for you. Make haste now; it’s ridiculous late.”

The boy pulled in his head and scowled at his aunt, but he dared not disobey, and went out slowly with a sulky mutter.

His aunt subdued a movement, that might have developed into a sound box on his ears, with a rather frightened glance at the bed. Naomi Holland was spent and dying, but her temper was still a thing to hold in dread, and her sister-in-law did not choose to rouse it by slapping Christopher. To her and her co-nurse the spasms of rage, which the