"When did this come?" asked Claudia eagerly.
"A very few moments after you left," said Aunt Jane. "Of course, if you had been here, you might just have caught the eight o'clock train—very late, my dear, for you to go by, but with your father so ill——" And Aunt Jane wiped a tear away.
Claudia also wept.
"Can nothing be done to-night?" she presently cried. "Must I wait till to-morrow? He may be——" But she did not like to finish the sentence.
Aunt Ruth had risen to the occasion; she was already adjusting her spectacles with trembling hands in order to explore the A B C Timetable. A very brief examination of the book showed that Claudia could not get home that night. They could only wait until morning.
Claudia spent a sleepless night. She had come up to London to find a mission in life. The first great sorrow had fallen upon her home in her absence, and by an inexcusable preoccupation she had perhaps made it impossible to reach home before her father's death.
She knew that pneumonia often claimed its victims swiftly; she might reach home too late.
Her father had been good to her in his own rather stern way. He was not a small, weak, or peevish character. To have helped him in sickness would have seemed a pleasant duty even to Claudia, who had contrived to overlook her mother's frail health. And others were serving him—that weak mother; Pinsett, too; and perhaps a hired nurse. It was unbearable.
"My dear," said Aunt Jane, as Claudia wept aloud, "we are in our heavenly Father's hands; let us ask Him to keep your dear father at least until you see him."
So those two old maids with difficulty adjusted their stiff knees to kneeling, and, as Aunt Jane lifted her quavering voice in a few sentences of simple prayer, she laid a trembling hand protectingly on Claudia.