Rupert and Sheba glanced at each other questioningly and listened with anxious eyes.
“And it’s different in a different way from what I expected,” the Judge went on. “They might have said and done a dozen things I should have been sort of ready for, but they didn’t. Somehow it seemed as if—as if the whole thing didn’t matter.”
Tom got up and began to walk about.
“That’s not the way things begin that are going to rush through,” he said.
Sheba followed him and slipped her hand through his arm.
“Do you think,” she faltered, “that perhaps we shall not get the money at all, Uncle Tom?”
Tom folded her hand in his—which was easily done.
“I’m afraid that if we do get it,” he answered, “it will not come to us before we want it pretty badly—the Lord knows how badly.”
For every day counts in the expenditure of a limited sum, and on days of discouragement Tom’s calculation of their resources left him a troubled man.
When Judge Rutherford had gone Rupert sat with Sheba in the scented summer darkness. He drew his chair opposite to hers and took one of her hands in both of his own.