"Send us money; Father not here."
"And if he does not send it, whatever shall we do?" cried Sylvia, who had to be told, if only for the sake of sobering her and making her more keenly alive to the responsibilities of the situation.
"He will send it, I am quite sure," replied Nealie, with a beautiful faith in Mr. Runciman's real goodness of heart that was justified in due course by the arrival of a cablegram authorizing her to draw fifty pounds from the Hammerville bank as she needed it.
But she had to start off in the grey dawn of the next morning, in company with the usurping Dr. Plumstead—as Sylvia would persist in calling him—without knowing that her need was to be met in this generous manner. It was perhaps the very darkest hour in her life, and her face was drawn and pinched with the weight of her care as she lifted it to the cold grey of the sky when she mounted into the high two-wheeled cart which the doctor had borrowed for the journey. But even as she looked, all the grey was flushed with rose colour from the rising sun, and the sight brought back her courage with a rush, so that she was able to turn and smile at the little group gathered at the door of the doctor's house to see her drive away.
"Mind you take good care of Rupert, Sylvia," she called, feeling that her next sister was really not old enough for such a heavy responsibility; only, as there was no one else to take it, of course Sylvia would have to do her best.
"I will see that she looks after him properly," said Rumple, with a wag of his head, at which the doctor laughed; for when sleep seized upon Rumple he was of little use in looking after other people.
Don and Billykins flung up their caps and shouted hurrah as Rockefeller moved off, and Ducky joined in with her shrill treble, so that Nealie felt they were doing their very best to keep her spirits up at the moment of parting, and she could not let them think their efforts were wasted in the least; therefore she waved her hand and tried to appear as free from care as the rest of them.
After the heavy wagon, Rockefeller made short work of the light-weight cart, and went along at such a tremendous pace that Nealie would certainly have been afraid if anyone but Dr. Plumstead had been driving. His treatment of Rupert, however, had inspired her with such confidence in him that she sat smiling and untroubled while the big, clumsy, vanhorse cut capers in the road, and then danced on all-fours because a small boy rushed out of one of the little wooden houses on the other side of the town and blew a blast on a bugle right under the horse's nose.
"It really looks as if the creature had not had enough work for the last three or four weeks," said the doctor, with a laugh, as he proceeded to get pace out of Rocky in preference to pranks.