I had not lighted the gas. The street-lamps sent up their rays, making the room semi-lucent. I took out my tower-key. What matter, if I held the cold iron thereof to my lips awhile? there was no frost in the March air then. I sent my restless fingers in and out of the wards, prisoning them often therein. As thus I stood, with cheek pressed against the windowpane, looking out upon the city, set into a rim of darkness, from out of which it flashed its million rays, papa came up.
"I didn't say good-night," he said, coming in, and to the window where I was. "But how is this, Anna? what has happened to my child? "—and he pointed to shining drops that glistened on the window-glass.
They must have come from my eyes; I could not deny their authorship, and so I confessed to tears of gladness at seeing him once more.
He looked fondly down at me through the dim light. I asked him after the tenant of my premises. He shook his head as one does in great doubt, said "life was uncertain," and repeated several other axioms, that were quite apart from his original style, and excessively annoying to me.
"Papa," I said, "why not tell me truly? will this man recover?"
"'Man proposes, God disposes,' my child," he said.
"I don't dispute the general truth," I replied,—"but, particularly, is this man's life in danger?"
He began to quote somebody's psalm or hymn about "fitful fevers and fleeting shadows."
My father has a fine, rich, variant power of sound with which to charm such as have ears to hear, and Anna Percival has been so endowed. Therefore she listened and waited to the end. When it came, she looked up into her father's face and said,—
"Papa, I am not a child, to be coaxed into forgetfulness; why will you not trust me? I am older than Sophie was when you took her in where I have not been; why will you not make me your friend?"—and some sudden collision of watery powers among the window-drops, whether from accretion or otherwise, sent a glistening rivulet down to the barrier of the sash.