“I am afraid to go in,” she said.
“I hear people in there talking and laughing.”
“They are all friends of yours.”
“Is my mother—will my mother...?”
“Child, your mother’s heart is breaking for the sight of you.”
Elsie ran forward to the doorway of the familiar room. A step forward. Mother and daughter stood in a tender embrace.
The mother’s face was radiant with great warmth of love. Patience rushed to her sister and clasped her close.
Michael Grogan had led a tiptoe retreat of the visitors leaving mother and daughters alone, but Patience called them back.
Elsie, smiling wanly, slipped like a little wraith across and into a chair beside her mother, and felt that dear hand clasping hers.
“It’s so good to be here with you,” she whispered, looking vaguely about at the others, then a dreadful fit of coughing seized her and she sank exhausted in her mother’s arms.