In reality, it was not the parting with Teddy and the baby which had tried her most, nor even the straining clasp of Flossie’s thin arms about her neck, but the sad patience on her father’s face, and the unsteadiness in his voice when he had said to her—
“I wish you could have stayed on at home for a while, Gertrude; it is lonely having you go away.”
“Let me stay, father,” she had cried. “I will wire from Nine Springs to headquarters that I can’t come back.”
“No, no, child; it would never do—your mother wouldn’t like it,” he answered; and nothing that she could say would move him. Only when she had boarded the cars, and been carried from his sight, the weary patience of his look remained in her memory to haunt her.
Her father was a broken man, she knew; the shock of the double bereavement and his severe sickness had undermined a constitution already worn down by hard work and rough living. If only she could have stayed at home to cheer him with her presence how thankful she would have been! But Mrs. Lorimer had willed it otherwise, and in that house it was the mother who decided everything.
There was a wait at Lytton when they changed cars again; and afterwards, on the run to Bratley, Gertrude was wondering, with a little trepidation, how Nell would meet and greet her.
Nell was a dear good girl, of course; hard-working, devoted, and self-sacrificing to a most extraordinary degree. But she was not refined or elegant in her manners, and her fearful old clothes added to her awkwardness. Suppose she should rush out from the office with a loud impulsive greeting when the cars stopped, how Dr. Russell would stare and wonder!
Gertrude shivered at the mere thought of such a thing; then reviewed Nell by the mental pictures taken during the time she was at Lorimer’s Clearing, doing two people’s work in a house of invalids. Nell’s hair had always been rough, her face not invariably clean, while her clothes! But Gertrude shrugged her shoulders and tried not to think of it at all, only the worst of it was, the more she tried the less was she able to banish the subject from her mind, until at length it became such absolute torture that beads of perspiration came out on her brow.
Dr. Russell, looking at her now and then with a grave, intent gaze, wondered at her secret agitation; but it is probable that he would have wondered still more if he had known its cause, for Gertrude did not look like a girl who would be influenced by a littleness of this description; but then, every heart has its own feelings, which no outsider can even guess at.
The cars slowed down at Bratley, and, holding Sonny in her arms, Gertrude rose from her seat and went out on to the rear platform. Dr. Russell was close behind her, laden with bags and bundles.