"None whatever," said Lucia, thinking it all over with a very sober face.
That letter had come as a very unpleasant break in a most happy visit.
It was not often that Lucia could get away from her home, where a little flock of step-brothers and sisters kept her busy from morning till night.
But this time she had got away! Her mother had long planned for her to visit some cousins of her own in the North, and Lucia had been with them for a month already.
She had begun to feel that her home in London was a very long way off, and that her step-father, and even her own mother, had grown of less absorbing interest than formerly. Life seemed to centre in that charming country house, her cousins with their affairs began to fill her horizon, and when the letters came from her mother speaking of her step-father having been ill with the dreaded influenza, and being better again, she dismissed the matter with the comfortable hope that no one else would take it, and that mother would not be over-tired.
Then she did not hear for a week, but was too happy to be nervous, when one evening, just as she and her cousins were settling down for a cosy time, the second post brought her that news which overturned all her plans, and spoke of changes which might alter the aspect of her life for years to come. Her step-father had had a relapse; a dormant delicacy of the chest had suddenly developed, and he was ordered to take a sea voyage if his life were to be saved.
"I have had to choose between him and our children, and he needs me the most; so I am going with him," wrote her mother. "You, my darling, will act a mother's part, I know, while I am gone. Come home at once, that I may give it all into your hands, for we start directly."
There was no choice, as Emmie had said; but while Lucia sat silently in her corner, she confessed to herself that never in her life before had any news been so unwelcome.
She loved her mother devotedly, and so she did her little brothers and sisters. Her step-father had always been most kind and generous to her, and she loved him too. But for all that, she blamed herself bitterly that she thought almost more of her own disappointment in being called home, than of the great anxiety and grief which had fallen upon it.
Early the next morning Lucia woke up to the knowledge of something which seemed like a heavy weight on her spirit. Then it all flashed upon her.