“Worry more when he glooms indoors—worry more when he gets mad at people. Nick is safe as houses outdoors alone.”

Christina felt increasingly shy about approaching the ticklish subject of help. There was a pause; then Ellen asked about what the doctor in Boston had said, and it all poured out in a flood—the long term that must be faced, and how somehow Christina had not been thinking ahead.

“I’ve been living from day to day, Ellen—that’s the trouble. A month ago Cornelius seemed so much better I had taken it for granted that we’d be out of the woods, come spring.”

“Well,” Ellen said drily, “doctors are a little like weathermen—they’re not always right, and they may be dead wrong. We were supposed not to get that storm out of Canada this time, but look at that sky!”

It was a strange, suspended, white darkness when one looked out of the windows—ominous. The two women looked out, each meeting whatever was brewing in her own way. Ellen got up, as she so often did when she was thinking something out, and picked dead leaves off a geranium. Then she spoke with her back to Christina.

“You know I’d be glad to help out, Christy …”

“You would?”

“Felt shy about asking, but it’s been on my mind, and now if I could help it would be just what I need. Get me out of the house!”

She turned now to give her friend a piercing look.

“Nick says your knee bothers you more than it did.”

“Nothing escapes that eye of Nick’s, does it? Frankly, I’ve been anxious. Can’t afford to let it get any worse, and that’s the truth. It would be a tremendous thing if you could come one or two mornings a week and dust around and straighten us up again.”

“I get pretty tired sitting all day, and my eyes bother me, so I’d be more than glad. I’ll come with Nick tomorrow. How’s that?”

Christina felt the tears pricking her eyes. It was not the first time that Ellen had been at her side when she needed help. There was the year, her eleventh, when she had come to stay at the farm. There was the time of Eben—when she could talk to Ellen and to no one else. And there was the more than once when she had been dreadfully anxious about John.

“That’s fine,” she managed to say. “What’s the rate these days? Would a dollar-seventy-five an hour be fair?”

“More’n I make sewing, I can tell you.”

And they changed the subject quickly because this talk of pay embarrassed them both.

CHRISTINA’S JOURNAL—December 18