All this time--for you are making your visit a very long one, so that
autumn has come, and the nights are growing cool, and Jenny and yourself
are transferring your little coquetries to the chimney-corner--poor
Charlie lies sick at home. Boyhood, thank Heaven! does not suffer
severely from sympathy when the object is remote. And those letters from
the mother, telling you that Charlie cannot play,--cannot talk even as
he used to do,--and that perhaps his "Heavenly Father will take him away
to be with him in the better world," disturb you for a time only.
Sometimes however they come back to your thought on a wakeful night,
and you dream about his suffering, and think--why it is not you, but
Charlie, who is sick? The thought puzzles you; and well it may, for in
it lies the whole mystery of our fate.

Those letters grow more and more discouraging, and the kind admonitions
of your mother grow more earnest, as if (though the thought does not
come to you until years afterward) she was preparing herself to fasten
upon you that surplus of affection which she fears may soon be withdrawn
forever from the sick child.

It is on a frosty, bleak evening, when you are playing with Nat, that
the letter reaches you which says Charlie is growing worse, and that you
must come to your home. It makes a dreamy night for you--fancying how
Charlie will look, and if sickness has altered him much, and if he will
not be well by Christmas. From this you fall away in your reverie to the
odd old house and its secret cupboards, and your aunt's queer caps; then
come up those black eyes of "your attached Jenny," and you think it a
pity that she is six month's older than you; and again--as you recall
one of her sighs--you think that six months are not much after all!

You bid her good-bye, with a little sentiment swelling in your throat,