CHAPTER XII

Valancy hurried home through the faint blue twilight—hurried too fast
perhaps. The attack she had when she thankfully reached the shelter of
her own room was the worst yet. It was really very bad. She might die
in one of those spells. It would be dreadful to die in such pain.
Perhaps—perhaps this was death. Valancy felt pitifully alone. When she
could think at all she wondered what it would be like to have some one
with her who could sympathise—some one who really cared—just to hold
her hand tight, if nothing else—some one just to say, “Yes, I know.
It’s dreadful—be brave—you’ll soon be better;” not some one merely
fussy and alarmed. Not her mother or Cousin Stickles. Why did the
thought of Barney Snaith come into her mind? Why did she suddenly feel,
in the midst of this hideous loneliness of pain, that _he_ would be
sympathetic—sorry for any one that was suffering? Why did he seem to
her like an old, well-known friend? Was it because she had been
defending him—standing up to her family for him?

She was so bad at first that she could not even get herself a dose of
Dr. Trent’s prescription. But eventually she managed it, and soon after
relief came. The pain left her and she lay on her bed, spent,
exhausted, in a cold perspiration. Oh, that had been horrible! She
could not endure many more attacks like that. One didn’t mind dying if
death could be instant and painless. But to be hurt so in dying!

Suddenly she found herself laughing. That dinner _had_ been fun. And it
had all been so simple. She had merely _said_ the things she had always
_thought_. Their faces—oh, their faces! Uncle Benjamin—poor,
flabbergasted Uncle Benjamin! Valancy felt quite sure he would make a
new will that very night. Olive would get Valancy’s share of his fat
hoard. Olive had always got Valancy’s share of everything. Remember the
dust-pile.

To laugh at her clan as she had always wanted to laugh was all the
satisfaction she could get out of life now. But she thought it was
rather pitiful that it should be so. Might she not pity herself a
little when nobody else did?

Valancy got up and went to her window. The moist, beautiful wind
blowing across groves of young-leafed wild trees touched her face with
the caress of a wise, tender, old friend. The lombardies in Mrs.
Tredgold’s lawn, off to the left—Valancy could just see them between
the stable and the old carriage-shop—were in dark purple silhouette
against a clear sky and there was a milk-white, pulsating star just
over one of them, like a living pearl on a silver-green lake. Far
beyond the station were the shadowy, purple-hooded woods around Lake
Mistawis. A white, filmy mist hung over them and just above it was a
faint, young crescent. Valancy looked at it over her thin left
shoulder.

“I wish,” she said whimsically, “that I may have _one_ little dust-pile
before I die.”