“That’s his bell,” Mrs. Souther answered. “He wants me. You need n’t mind.”
“But he must have heard—” began Hannah breathlessly. Then she stopped abruptly.
“Do you think he heard me?” George asked.
“Oh, he ’d wake up about this time anyway,” his mother said. “Besides,” she added, with a novel note of rebellion in her voice, “what if he did? You have a right to come to see me, I should hope.”
Again the bell tinkled. Old Sarah turned to go into the house.
“You’ll find her down to the shore,” she repeated.
He turned away at her word, and with long, rapid strides took the path which Miss Edith had taken earlier. The mother paused to look at him from the threshold. Hannah knitted on with a feverish haste and a frightened countenance. For a third time the bell called, now more imperatively, and Sarah mounted the crooked stairway followed by the frightened gaze of her sister.
In the cool and shaded chamber into which Sarah went, a chamber fitted with high-shouldered old mahogany furniture, the youngest piece of which had known the grandfathers of the withered old man who lay in the carved bed, the air seemed to her electric with dreadful possibilities. Mr. Grayman was sitting up in bed, his scant white locks elfishly disheveled about the pale parchment of his face, his eyes unnaturally bright.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, with fierce querulousness. “Why did n’t you come when I rang?”
She did not at first reply, but busied herself with the medicine which it was time for him to take.