“What is the matter?” asked Nell, faintly.
“I’ve had a letter from Dr. Shaw, of Nine Springs, asking about you. Miss Lorimer’s father is dead; the mother is ill and incapable of anything; and the doctor wants to know if you are well enough to go to them,” Mrs. Nichols replied.
CHAPTER XXIV
A Sister by Adoption
GERTRUDE moved about the house with a sense of unreality about her. It could not be true, she told herself, that her father lay sleeping his last long sleep in the next room, while her mother was lying too ill to know or care what became of the family in this sad time.
It could not be true, but only a bad dream from which she would wake presently; only meanwhile she must do her best for the helpless children, who had no one to look to but herself.
Oh, why was life so hard, so very hard, for some people, when others found existence so delightfully easy?
It was her mother she had come home from Bratley to nurse; but it was her father, after all, who had needed her most.
She had not realized that he was ill until the morning when he could not get up; then, when Dr. Shaw came to see him, the truth fell on to her as a crushing blow that he was slipping out of life.
When he died, Flossie had besought her to send for Nell; but, remembering Nell’s battered condition, Gertrude would not even write to tell her of the sorrow which had come to them.