Keith McBain met them at the door and greeted the doctor with a handshake and a smile that seemed for the moment to transform his stern grey face, lighting it up with a rare sympathy and a kindliness that seldom found expression in his work-a-day life.
"The roads must be bad," he remarked, after they had exchanged greetings, and then, when the doctor had removed his coat and looked questioningly at him, "He's in there. The girl's with him."
The doctor, a young, energetic chap, whose manner was efficiency itself, went at once into the room that Keith McBain had indicated. No sooner was he gone than Anne stepped quickly to the old man and took him eagerly by the arm.
"How is he?" she said.
Keith McBain shook his head doubtfully.
"He may be some better," he replied. "He has slept all day, except now and then when he asked for a drink. He talks all right when he's awake, but——"
Cherry came out of the room and closed the door after her. Her face showed clearly the effects of what she had been through in the last few days, but no one could see the slightest indication that she was ready to give up. The light in her dark eyes shone stronger and more steady than ever. She had entered a conflict of which, for the time being at least, she felt herself the centre. The little world she had built for herself, and in which she had lived so long without giving more than a passing thought to the evil forces that were moving about her, was now in a state of chaos and disorder. She could no longer say to herself, as she had done so often before, that time would show the way. She knew enough of McCartney's designs (he had revealed enough to her himself) to know that unless something was done at once a very short time would bring disaster upon her father—of what nature and by what means she had ceased trying to imagine—and she knew not what misfortune upon herself.
And this conflict was supplemented by another, no less keen, that was being fought with her own heart as a battleground. In the room she had just left lay the man in whom, for the first time in her life, and for reasons she could not understand, she had imposed her fullest confidence in the face of impending disaster. But he was more than a protector. She had realized more keenly than ever, while she watched beside his cot, that a heart-hunger had seized her that only this big boy of a man could satisfy. She prayed for his recovery, for his own sake and for her father's sake—but passionately for the sake of the woman that she was.
And now as she stood by the door she had just closed and looked at Anne, who was talking to her father, she felt as one who has awakened from a happy dream. In her pride she could not think of showing any but the most casual regard for Anne; but in her riotous young heart she almost hated her. Even as these thoughts flashed across her mind she saw her father place an arm about Anne's shoulders.
"Anne," he said quietly, "you've done your part, girl. But you've got to get some rest now. Cherry—make her go to bed as soon as she has had a bite to eat."