“Brute! Brute that I am! I haven’t been over here for days and weeks and all the time my old friend was ill and here I was irritated with him—I even blamed the poor child a little. I felt somehow she was lacking backbone in allowing the old man to ride over her so. I’m a worm! A worm! Nothing but a miserable boneless invertebrate.”
The doctor smiled at the incongruous epithets Mr. Conant was so ruthlessly applying to himself. Irene patted her uncle on the shoulder.
“Now Uncle Peter, let’s not worry about what we might have done, but just do what is to be done now. Suppose you go down to the newspaper office and find out what they know and stop and tell Aunt Hannah that I shall have to stay over here for the night and get her to send me a dressing gown and some toilet things.”
“That’s right!” agreed the doctor, looking at Irene with appreciation. “Now, Miss Macfarlane, you get the nurse’s registrar on the ’phone and have them send us a good nurse immediately. Mrs. Dexter insists that she can do the nursing with your help, but I do not intend to have her break herself down. She may have more to stand than she realizes. Pray God the report about the Spokane is false!”
A night of anxiety followed. Colonel Hathaway was still unconscious when gray dawn crept down the quiet city streets. In spite of the arrival of a comfortably efficient nurse, Mary Louise could not be persuaded to leave her grandfather’s bedside.
“He might awake and ask for me,” she declared over and over when she was told she had better take a little rest.
As the first rays of the morning sun found their way into his room, the old man opened his eyes. In them was the expression of a wondering child.
“What is the matter?” he whispered faintly.
“Oh, Grandpa Jim, good morning!” said Mary Louise taking his hand in hers.
“Good morning, child! Aren’t you up early? Where is my boy?”