Free The Parkerstown Delegate by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

sake, that Lois was coming back. They had been good friends for years.
    There was nothing handsome about Franklin Winters except his great, honest dark eyes, and his smile. People said his smile was like a benediction. That smile lighted up his whole face as he turned to go into the house, and made him look handsome. Although he was not a very well-educated young man, and although when he talked he did not always use the best of English, still the slow, even tone in which he spoke his words and the rare smile with which they were often accompanied, took the sharp edge from what would otherwise have grated on the refined ear, and made one feel that here was true heart culture at least, if there was not overmuch education.
    It was pleasant, too, to see the tenderness with which he approached the bed of his young invalid brother, after he had removed the great straw hat which covered his well-shaped head, and stood some minutes at the kitchen sink, making a half-way toilet before the cracked looking-glass.
    “Harley, I’ve some good news for you,” he said. “Lois is coming home to-night on the evening express, and her father says he’s sure she’ll run right over here the first thing. Maybe she’ll come in the morning.”
    The joy of the young invalid was quite apparent. He had very few pleasures in his monotonous life. Ever since the scarlet fever had attacked him, several years ago, his had been but a weary, painful existence.
    He was not much more than thirteen years old, but his life of pain had made him old in many ways beyond his years, while the constant necessary reliance upon others had kept him quite a child too. He had the same dark, handsome eyes as his brother, but his face, though a trifle thin and pinched with the pain he had suffered, was beautiful as any girl’s.
    “Oh, Frank, I’m so glad!” he exclaimed, catching his brother’s hand and squeezing it. “Now she’ll have more stories to tell, and maybe some new plans for me. I’m so tired of all the old ones, and besides I’ve outgrown them. Three months is a long time when one has to spend it on the bed, you know, and can use the nights to live in as well as the days— that is, most of them”—and he smiled a sorry little smile.
    “On the evening express did you say she was coming?” he asked again suddenly as if a new idea had struck him. “Then why couldn’t you carry me into the other room for just a little while and let me watch it go by? It would be such fun to see it and then to think that there was someone I knew in the lighted-up cars. I’ve watched it before, you know, but I didn’t ever have any one in them to feel that way about. Why, it would be ’most as good as going in a train again myself, as I did when I was such a little fellow before I was hurt, with father. I can remember real well about how the cars looked, and if I could see the express go by to-night and could think she was in it, maybe I could imagine myself in those cars whirling along beside her, coming home from the city like any boy. Say, Franklin, you will, won’t you? It won’t hurt me to be moved to-night, a bit, for I’ve had a real good day,” he finished triumphantly, and then looked up to his brother’s face with such pleading in his eyes as could not be resisted, albeit the brother’s were so full of tears that he was forced to turn his head the other way for a moment.
    “If mother says so, Harley” he managed to get out, and then strode from the room to find the mother and choke down his rising feelings.
    Harley had his wish, although the troubled mother doubted the wisdom of it when she saw the fever into which her boy worked himself before the train did finally rush by. And then it was such a passing pleasure, with all his imaginings of himself on board. A few sparks, a few shrieks, a roar, a rush, a bright, quick glancing of lighted windows with dim figures in them, and then all was over, and Harley could scarcely get to sleep, so excited