"Sure you do," laughed MacCammon. "So do I. All of us unmarried fellows know all about rearing daughters. Come on, girls, we may as well go quietly and try to live at peace with this quarrelsome creature your father has pushed on to us."
The girls passed slowly from the room, but their faces brightened a little when one of the nurses said:
"Don't worry. The doctor is right. The danger is all over. We do not know yet just how fine the eyes will be—but the danger is gone. Run along and get your coffee. Your father will sleep a long time."
"Then may we wire the girls now—that he is all right? I know they will be anxious."
"Yes, indeed, wire them at once. Tell them there is no danger, and we are sure the eyes will be infinitely better—certainly there will be no more headaches and pain. And cheer up."
After the telegram was safely on its way it seemed quite natural for the four of them to sit at a small table in the nurses' dining-room, sipping the hot coffee, realizing that after all they were alive, and father was nearly all right, and things were going on just the same as before he had kissed them good-by and gone into the grim white room that held so many terrors for them.
After their coffee the doctor took them around the hospital with him, introducing them to ministers here and there. They smiled at a few whom the doctor frankly pronounced cases of chronic grouch, and were smiled at by other, very sick ones, who, the doctor declared, were endowed with an abundant and all-pervading Christianity that kept their dispositions riotously pleasant in spite of physical pain. And then he invited them to come with him in his car to call on another patient of his down the road a way—"one of the greatest living testimonies to the efficacy of the Christian religion, because he has the most pronounced absence of it of any one I have ever seen."
The girls hesitated, wanting to get back to their father, but he would brook no opposition.