“It will do for a few days, my dear girl; or, at least, for a few hours, until we can look about us, and secure professional assistance. There is not the slightest danger of her taking the disease now, you know; indeed, you might be with him yourself, only he is so nervous about you that he will not listen to reason. But she will take good care of him. I really think she understands how to do it.”
Ruth made no reply; she could not. She wanted to ask what her father said, and whether he was likely to bear up under such an added weight of misery as this last. But, reflecting that it would not do to say anything of the kind, she took refuge in silence. And the work of rearranging this disorganized and disordered household went on.
In an incredibly short space of time, considering all that had to be planned and arranged, the doctor had done his share of it, given explicit and peremptory directions as to what should, and what should not be done, and was gone. As for Judge Burnham, he had gone directly from the sick-room to Judge Erskine’s office, on a matter of business for the latter. So the two sisters were left alone in the library, to stare at each other, or out into the street, as they chose.
Susan Erskine had been a very silent looker-on at this morning’s confusion. Ruth could not tell what she thought. Beyond the first exclamation of surprise, she had expressed no dismay. A little touch of some feeling (what was it?) she had shown once, when her mother was planning, and announcing that she did not intend to take the disease, and, if she did, she might as well as anyone.
“Oh, mother!” Susan had said, in a low, distressed tone—a tone full of suppressed feeling of some sort—and her mother had turned on her sharply, with a—
“Well, child, what?”
“Nothing,” Susan said, as one who had checked her sentence and was holding herself silent. And thereafter she made no sign.
And so at last these two sisters were stranded in that deserted library. Ruth, on her part, gazing blankly out of the window, watching the hurrying passers-by with a curious sense of wonderment as to what they would think could they know what was transpiring inside. Suddenly she turned from the window with an exclamation of dismay—a thought, which until now had dropped into the background, returned to her.
“There isn’t a servant in the house!”