It seemed as if their elderly cousin had come down from her calm and well-ordered seclusion at Elmhurst, Connecticut, just when they needed her most. Usually she contented herself with sending the family useful and proper gifts on birthdays and at Christmas, but they seldom saw her.
She was forty-seven, plump, serene, and still good-looking, with her blonde hair just beginning to look a trifle silvery, and a fine network of wrinkles showing around the corners of her eyes and mouth.
“Land alive, Margaret Ann,” she had told Mrs. Craig happily the moment she set foot inside the wide entrance hall at Sandy Cove, “didn’t I know you needed me?” And she laughed. “I didn’t plan to descend on you so sudden, but it looked as if you needed someone, Tom down sick and you worn out taking care of him. Don’t you worry at all about my being put out. I’ll stay here with the children and take care of things till you get back home.”
And Mrs. Craig had agreed thankfully. After a three months’ siege with her husband through his nervous breakdown, she was glad indeed to welcome the strong assistance of Rebecca.
“Let’s put it up to her right now,” Kit exclaimed. “I’d just as soon ask her if Doris is afraid.”
Before the others could hold her back, she had slipped out of the living room and was racing up the stairs, two at a time, into the large sunny room at the south end of the house where one could look out over Long Island Sound. But at the door Kit stopped short. Over at the window stood Becky, energetically wiping her eyes with a generous-sized plain linen handkerchief, and the end of her nose was red from weeping.
“Come in, my dear, come right in,” she said hastily, as Kit backed away. “I’m glad you happened up. Come here to your old second cousin and comfort her. I feel as if all the waves in the Sound had washed over me.”
Kit hurried over, put her hand on Becky’s arm, and squeezed it reassuringly. “What’s the matter? Anything about Dad?” demanded Kit, swift to catch the connection between her cousin’s tears and words. “Did you get a letter?”
“No,” answered Rebecca, “your mother just telephoned me from Philadelphia. Your father is worse and the doctors think he would be better off at home. They will be home in three days. You know, Kit, they’d never do that if the doctors could do anything more.” There was a break in Rebecca’s voice. “I just wish I had him up home safe in the room he used to have when he was a boy. He had measles the same time I did when my mother was alive. That’s your Aunt Charlotte, Kit, she that was Charlotte Peabody from Boston. But I always seemed to take after the Craig side instead of the Peabody, they said, and Tom was just like my own brother. I wish I had him away from doctors and trained nurses and Army hospitals, and had old Doctor Gallup tending him instead. I’ve seen him march right up to Charon’s ferryboat and haul out somebody he didn’t think was through living.”
Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her head, looking down at the pines, their branches lightly crystalled with snow and ice. Somehow it didn’t seem as if God could let her father slip out of the world after He had allowed him to come home from the war. And just when they all needed him so much. During all the months of illness, the girls and Tommy had not grasped the seriousness of it. He only seemed weak and not himself. They knew he had not gone back to work in his office in New York after he left the Army, but they had taken these things lightly.