Miss Strong appeared at the door. “She has taken the ether very well indeed; they are much pleased,” she said softly. They hung on her words, they overwhelmed her with questions. She soothed them like children.
It grew suddenly clear to Belden that Caddy would die. It must be so. He wondered that they had hoped for anything else. He was sorry for them all. He watched indifferently while Miss Strong led the children away—he knew she was taking them to their father. Later, while Aunt Lucia, on her knees, read through streaming eyes from her prayer-book, and Susy talked nervously to him, he watched the firm, full figure of the woman pacing up and down the piazza outside, her arm drawn through his restless boy’s.
“God bless her!” he said aloud.
Afterwards he could never recall the consecutive happenings of the end. He saw only separate pictures.
In one, a strange young man opened the door and said the words that frightened them with delight.
In another, a drawn, old, white-faced man—surely not Dr. Jameson—leaned weakly in a chair, while a woman handed him a tiny glass of colored liquid.
In yet another, a father hid his face in his little daughter’s bosom and sobbed, with shaking shoulders; his tall son smiled bravely over the bent head.
In the last picture he himself bore a part; for when he came upon his shy, suspicious boy clasped in the kind arms of the woman whose brown eyes, once seen, had haunted his thoughts ever since, he gathered them both to him irresistibly. As he laid his cheek against hers, he felt that it was wet with tears.
“It lies with you now,” he whispered in her ear, “to give her back to us, well and strong. He says you can. Afterwards—”
She drew away from him.