After the doctor had gone Sue
went into the workroom and
cried a Japanese napkin to a
pulp. Then she swaggered into
Johnsy's room with her drawing
board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a
ripple under the bedclothes, with
her face toward the window. Sue
stopped whistling, thinking she
was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to
illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to
Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors
write to pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers
and a monocle of the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she
heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to
the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window
and counting - counting backward.
"Twelve," she said, and little later "eleven"; and then "ten," and
"nine"; and then "eight" and "seven", almost together.
Sue look solicitously out of the window. What was there to count?
There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side
of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled
and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The
cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until
its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
"What is it, dear?" asked Sue.
"Six," said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. "They're falling faster
now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my
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