The children shook their heads sorrowfully.
"Wouldn't to-morrow do?" he suggested, hopefully; but there was no response from the children, and the weight that had been settling down upon him, in the region of his chest, noticeably increased. He tried to shake it off, it was so depressing—like the accruing misfortune of some pending event.
"Don't shake," said a voice behind him; "that isn't your misfortune. You will only shake it off on the children, and it's time enough for them to bear it when they wake up in the morning and find out—"
"Find out what?" The President asked it fearfully.
"Find out—find out—" droned the voice, monotonously.
The President sat up very straight in his chair. "The children—the children." He remembered now—they were the children from the incurable ward at Saint Margaret's.
He sank back with a feeling of great helplessness, and closed his eyes again. And there he sat, immovable, his finger still marking his place in the report of the United Charities.
The Oldest Trustee sat alone, knitting comforters for the Preventorium patients. Like many another elderly person, her usual retiring hour was later than that of the younger members of her household, undoubtedly due to the frequent cat-naps snatched from the evening.
The Oldest Trustee had a habit of knitting the day's events in with her yarn. What she had done and said and heard were all thought over again to the rhythmic click of her needles. And the results at the end of the evening were usually a finished comforter and a comfortable feeling. This night, however, the knitting lagged and the thoughts were unaccountably dissatisfying; she could not even settle down to a cat-nap with the habitual serenity.
"I don't know why I should feel disturbed," and the Oldest Trustee prodded her yarn ball with a disquieting needle, "but I certainly miss the usual gratification of a day well spent."