Christopher and Columbus Read Online Free PDF

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conceal the fact that she was sniffing.
    Anna-Rose discreetly didn't look at her. Then she suddenly
whipped out her handkerchief and waved it violently.
    Anna-Felicitas forgot her eyes and nose and craned her head
forward. "Who are you waving to?" she asked,
astonished.
    "Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose, waving, "Good-bye!
Good-bye!"
    "Who? Where? Who are you talking to?" asked
Anna-Felicitas. "Has any one come to see us off?"
    "Good-bye! Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose.
    The figures on the wharf were getting smaller, but not until
they had faded into a blur did Anna-Rose leave off waving. Then she
turned round and put her arm through Anna-Felicitas's and held
on to her very tight for a minute.
    "There wasn't anybody," she said. "Of course
there wasn't. But do you suppose I was going to have us
looking
like people who aren't seen off?"
    And she drew Anna-Felicitas away to the chairs, and when they
were safely in them and rolled up to their chins in the rug, she
added, "That man--" and then stopped. "What
man?"
    "Standing just behind us--"
    "Was there a man?" asked Anna-Felicitas, who never saw
men any more than she, in her brief career at the hospital, had
seen pails.
    "Yes. Looking as if in another moment he'd be sorry for
us," said Anna-Rose.
    "Sorry for us!" repeated Anna-Felicitas, roused to
indignation.
    "Yes. Did you ever?"
    Anna-Felicitas said, with a great deal of energy while she put
her handkerchief finally and sternly away, that she didn't
ever; and after a pause Anna-Rose, remembering one of her many new
responsibilities and anxieties--she had so many that sometimes for
a time she didn't remember some of them--turned her head to
Anna-Felicitas, and fixing a worried eye on her said, "You
won't go forgetting your Bible, will you, Anna F.?"
    "My Bible?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, looking
blank.
    "Your German Bible. The bit about
wenn die bösen Buben locken, so folge sie nicht
."
    Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a
troubled brow said again, "You won't go and forget that,
will you, Anna F.?"
    For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty. In most people's eyes
she was very pretty, but in Anna-Rose's she was the most
exquisite creature God had yet succeeded in turning out. Anna-Rose
concealed this conviction from her. She wouldn't have told her
for worlds. She considered it wouldn't have been at all good
for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since they could both
remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her defects,
concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and on the
way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.
    But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her
own face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to
Anna-Felicitas's somehow was the dearest nose; and that her
leanness was lovely,--the same sort of slender grace her mother had
had in the days before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its
last phase; and that her head was set so charmingly on her neck
that when she drooped and forgot her father's constant
injunction to sit up,--"For," had said her father at
monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as
straight as a fir-tree,"--she only seemed to fall into even
more attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that
Anna-Rose alone had the charge of looking after this abstracted and
so charming younger sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey
to her while tactfully avoiding putting ideas into the poor
child's head which might make her conceited, that it behoved
her to conduct herself with discretion.
    But she found tact a ticklish thing, the most difficult thing of
all to handle successfully; and on this occasion hers was so
elaborate, and so carefully wrapped up in Scriptural language, and
German Scripture at that, that Anna-Felicitas's slow mind
didn't succeed in disentangling her meaning, and after a space
of staring at her with a mild inquiry in her eyes, she decided that
perhaps she hadn't got one. She was much