'No,' said Nurse Brannan; 'He has not changed!'
Lucy's tears were dropping fast; she could not trust herself to go in. She crept softly out of the room and shut the door, and went across the landing to Mrs. Rae's room.
The Master's wife was always glad to see Lucy; she gave her better accounts of the Master than anyone else in the household. She looked up when Lucy came in, and noted with her failing eyes, instinctively sharpened by love, that Lucy had been crying.
'Have you seen the Master?' she asked, with a little catch in her voice.
'Yes, oh yes! he is better to-day, and giving the nurse quite a discourse upon the parables. You remember what lovely sermons he used to preach upon the parables?'
The Master's wife smiled; she remembered every word of them. They were her comfort and stay now, those old sermons of the Master's; they made the way quite clear before her; they removed all the difficulties. She would have been shocked if she had known that that nurse from Addenbroke's had been so presumptuous as to attempt to explain the parables he knew so much about to the Master.
'You must get me a volume of his sermons, my dear—his first sermons; I may have forgotten some of them; and Mary shall read them. It will not be like hearing his voice, but—it—it will bring back something of the old time.'
Lucy stayed longer than she had intended at the lodge. She had only reckoned to look in and pay a short visit to each sick-room, and have a chat with Cousin Mary, and go away; but she had to go to the Master's library and fetch that volume of sermons before she went.
The Senior Tutor was sitting down in the Master's place at the Master's writing-table, answering the Master's letters, when Lucy went into the library. It would be his own place soon. He usually came over to the lodge for an hour in the afternoon now, and attended to whatever college business there might be to attend to, and look through the Master's college correspondence. He used to go through it with Mary once, when she opened the Master's letters; now he went through it alone.