“Good-bye,” I said. “This explains why I must leave you.” I put the telegram into her hand and rushed out of the room. I am not quite sure to this day whether I bid the kind Grays good-bye. I know that somehow or other I found myself in a cab, and in some fashion I caught an early train, and reached home in the bright spring sunshine before the day had half travelled through its course.
Even our ugly garden showed faint traces of the resurrection of all things. A stunted lilac-tree was putting out buds. An almond-tree was adorning itself in a hazy pink robe. There was a faint, tender perfume of violets in the air. I turned the handle of the shabby little front-door and went in.
If spring had given tokens of its presence outside, however, it had printed no fairy footfall inside our ugly and desolate little home. Inside there was close air, confusion, untidiness; but there was also something else—supreme terror, a dark fear. The shadow of this fear sat on my father’s brow. He hurried to meet me the moment I set foot inside the threshold; his face was unkempt, unwashed, his eyes bloodshot; he held out a trembling hand, and grasped my shoulder.
“Thank heaven you have come, Rose,” he said.
“How is mother?” I managed to gasp.
My father’s painful clutch on my shoulder grew harder and firmer.
“Come in here,” he said. He dragged me into the drawing-room, and softly closed the door. “Listen,” he said; “yesterday night your mother’s cough grew worse; this morning she broke a blood-vessel.”
“Then she is dying,” I said in a voice of terror.
“No, she shan’t die—you have got to save her!”
“I? Father—father—how can I?”