“We’ll come up here often, won’t we, Eve?”
“As often as you like, darling.”
The second ascent was made in March, when the peach trees and anemones were all in bloom, and the gold of the mimosas was a glory of the past. This time Peggy found the winding walks long and wearisome, and although, in spite of Eve’s entreaties, she persisted in reaching the summit, the journey had evidently been too much for her. She sank exhausted on a bench, and it was nearly an hour before she was rested enough to mount the little platform on which the telescope stood, and explore the distance, looking for the French squadron which was rounding the point of the Esterelles, on its way to Toulon. Poor little Peggy! She was the only person who did not believe in the seriousness of her case.
“You and Dr. Bright make too much fuss about me,” she said to Eve, seeing tears in the fond sister’s eyes. “I am only growing. See how short my frock is! I have grown inches since Christmas.”
She stretched out her thin legs—so thin as to make the feet look abnormally big, and contemplated the spectacle with a satisfied air.
“I am going to be very tall,” she said. “I have only outgrown my strength. That is all that is the matter with me. Sophy and Jenny always said as much. And as for the cough which seems to frighten you so, it’s only a stomach cough. Sophy said so.”
Vansittart had procured every contrivance which could make Peggy’s life easier. He bought her a donkey, on whose back she could be carried up to the Signal, and when her own back grew too weak to endure the fatigue of sitting on the donkey he bought her a wheel chair, which a patient Provençal two-legged beast of burden was willing to drag about all day, if Peggy pleased. And at each stage of her weakness—at each step on the downward road—he found some contrivance to make locomotion easier, so that Peggy might live out of doors, in the sunshine and on the sea.
Alas! there came a day when Peggy no longer cared to be carried about, when even the ripening loveliness of the land, the warmth and splendour of the southern spring, the white-sailed skiff with its quaint old sailors talking their unintelligible Cannois, and chivalrously attentive to Peggy’s lightest wish—the time came when even these things could not tempt her from the couch in the garden, where she lay and watched the opening orange blossoms, and wondered who would be there to mark the first change from green to gold in the turn of the year, or thought of Eve’s wedding and the orange wreath in her hair, and marvelled to remember how strong her young limbs felt in that gladdest of midsummers, and how slight a thing it had been to walk to the Roman village upon Bexley Hill, or to the pine-crowned crest of Blackdown. And now Vansittart had to carry her to the sofa in the orange grove, and she lay there supine all through the golden afternoon, while Eve, who was said to be herself in delicate health, sat in a low chair near her, and read aloud from Dumas’ historical novels, or some fairy tale.
But this increasing weakness was of no consequence, Peggy protested, when she saw Eve looking anxious about her. She had only outgrown her strength. When she had done growing she would be as strong as ever, and able to climb those Sussex hills just as well as ever. But she would not be here to see the flower change to the fruit. That miracle of Nature’s handicraft would be for other eyes—for the eyes of some other weakling, perhaps, passing, like Peggy, through the ordeal of overgrowth. But there was something far more wonderful than tree or flower, which had been whispered about by Peggy’s nurse. There was the hope of a baby nephew or a baby niece in the first month of summer, a baby that was to open its eyes on some cool Alpine valley, to which Mr. and Mrs. Vansittart and their charge would migrate, when the plane trees by the harbour had unfolded their broad leaves, and the sun that looked upon Cannes was too fierce for any but the hardy natives of the old fishing village. In that sweet summer time a baby was to appear among them, and take its place in all their hearts and on all their knees, and was to reign over them by the divine right of the firstborn. Peggy’s nurse told her that, were it only for the sake of this newcomer, she ought to take care of herself, and get well quickly.
“You wouldn’t like not to see the baby, would you, Miss Margaret?”
Peggy always felt inclined to laugh when her prim attendant called her Miss Margaret. She had never been addressed by her baptismal name by anyone else; but Benson was a superior person, who had lived only in the best families, and who did everything in a superior way.
“Like not to see Eve’s baby? Why, of course I shall see it—see it and nurse it, every day of my life,” answered Peggy.
“Of course, miss, if you are well enough when June comes.”
“If—I—am—well—enough,” Peggy repeated slowly, turning towards the nurse with an earnest gaze. “Perhaps you mean that I may not live till June. I heard you say something about me to the housemaid yesterday morning when she was making your bed. I was only half asleep; though I was
