“Of course, we will wait for papa,” said Grace, turning round from the window.
When the man went away poor little Milly, overtired and depressed, fell a-crying. “Oh, how strange it is! Oh, how lonely it is!” she cried. “I feel as if there was nobody alive—nobody that knew us.”
Grace’s lip twitched and quivered a little too. “How silly!” she said; “this is how you always are—up to the skies one moment, and down to the depths the next. What does it matter if nobody knows us? Two of us can go through the world—with papa.”
“But what has become of papa?” said Milly.
They did not know what to think. He was not a man to be out at night, nor, though he was so undemonstrative, was he a man to abandon his children to an evening in an inn by themselves. Could anything have happened to him? There flashed across the minds of both recollections of stories they had heard, of sudden disappearances, stories mixed up in a great confusion with the Morgue, of which they remembered the name and the dismal use, without clearly remembering where it was; and of people found in the river, and all kinds of terrible catastrophes. These were so much too terrible, however, that after a while Grace laughed.
“What are you laughing at? I don’t feel at all like laughing,” Milly said in an aggrieved tone.
“We are behaving as if something had happened,” Grace said; “such nonsense! Papa has been detained, that’s all. I hope he is not getting wet out in this rain.”
“Oh, I hope he is not getting wet!” Milly said, rising up hastily and running to the window. Milly had a turn for taking care of everybody’s health. She was pleased with the importance of being a little “delicate” herself.
“I don’t see how he should,” said Grace with another laugh, which was somewhat forced, “when there are cabs at every step. Of course, he has not made up his mind to get wet, or to get lost, or to have an accident, solely to make us uncomfortable the very first day, like a naughty child. The dinner will be spoiled; that is all that will happen.”
“As if it mattered about the dinner!” said Milly with feminine indifference, coming back from the window. The rain was not quite so heavy, and their spirits began to rise.