Emily was blinking back her tears.
“But I thought it best. He will improve now, I am confident, and if we can control the pulmonary difficulty, I am sure of it.”
She had turned and hastily gathering her skirts, ran up the stairs. She hesitated a moment in the doorway of his room, and by the dim light of the tiny star of gas saw the outlines of the form under the white counterpane. She fluttered across to the bed, and sank softly beside him. She laid her hand on his hot dry brow.
“Father—I’ve come.”
The old man stirred and tried to turn his head.
“I’m glad,” he said. “It was a long ways.”
“I’m going to nurse you, and make you well,” she said with a cheer in her voice of which her heart was void.
The doctor pleaded for a trained nurse, but Emily, with the old-fashioned prejudice of women, indignantly refused, as though the mere idea involved some reflection upon her own powers, and her own constancy. For a week she watched by his side, and waited on him, taking his temperature hourly, and keeping a clinical chart like those she had seen in the hospitals, in the old days of her charities, determined that the lack of a trained nurse should not be felt. And then the congestion in his lungs passed, he breathed easily once more, his fever broke, and he lay, weak and faint, but smiling at her.