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When Mrs. Hart asked Corona to go in and see Jacky, Frances went too. The sick boy, a child with a delicate, wasted face and large, bright eyes, lay in a tiny bedroom off the kitchen. The air was hot and heavy. Mrs. Hart stood at the foot of the bed with her tragic face.

“We have to set up nights with him now,” she said. “It’s awful hard on me and my man. The neighbours are kind enough and come sometimes, but most of them have enough to do. His medicine has to be given every half hour. I’ve been up for three nights running now. Jabez was off to the tavern for two. I’m just about played out.”

She suddenly broke down and began to cry, or rather whimper, in a heart-broken way.

Corona looked troubled. “I wish I could come tonight, Mrs. Hart, but I’m afraid I’m really not strong enough yet.”

“I don’t know much about sickness,” spoke up Frances firmly, “but if to sit by the child and give him his medicine regularly is all that is necessary, I am sure I can do that. I’ll come and sit up with Jacky tonight if you care to have me.”

Afterwards, when she and Corona were driving away, she wondered a good deal at herself. But Corona was so evidently pleased with her offer, and took it all so much as a matter of course, that Frances had not the courage to display her wonder. They had their drive through the great green bowl of the country valley, brimming over with sunshine, and afterwards Corona made Frances go home with her to tea.

Rev. Elliott Sherwood had got back from his pastoral visitations, and was training his sweet peas in the way they should go against the garden fence. He was in his shirt sleeves and wore a big straw hat, and seemed in nowise disconcerted thereby. Corona introduced him, and he took Grey Tom away and put him in the barn. Then he went back to his sweet peas. He had had his tea, he said, so that Frances did not see him again until she went home. She thought he was a very indifferent young man, and not half so nice as his sister.

But she went and sat up with Jacky Hart that night, getting to the Cove at dark, when the sea was a shimmer of fairy tints and the boats were coming in from the fishing grounds. Jacky greeted her with a wonderful smile, and later on she found herself watching alone by his bed. The tiny lamp on the table burned dim, and outside, on the rocks, there was loud laughing and talking until a late hour.

Afterwards a silence fell, through which the lap of the waves on the sands and the far-off moan of the Atlantic surges came sonorously. Jacky was restless and wakeful, but did not suffer, and liked to talk. Frances listened to him with a new-born power of sympathy, which she thought she must have caught from Corona. He told her all the tragedy of his short life, and how bad he felt, about Dad’s taking to drink and Mammy’s having to work so hard.

The pitiful little sentences made Frances’s heart ache. The maternal instinct of the true woman awoke in her. She took a sudden liking to the child. He was a spiritual little creature, and his sufferings had made him old and wise. Once in the night he told Frances that he thought the angels must look like her.

“You are so sweet pretty,” he said gravely. “I never saw anyone so pretty, not even Miss C’rona. You look like a picture I once saw on Mr. Sherwood’s table when I was up at the manse one day ‘fore I got so bad I couldn’t walk. It was a woman with a li’l baby in her arms and a kind of rim round her head. I would like something most awful much.”