An hour passed, and the gate-bell of the villa rang.
They both started—they both knew the ring. It was the hour when the postman brought their newspapers from London. In past days, what hundreds on hundreds of times they had torn off the cover which inclosed the newspaper, and looked at the same column with the same weary mingling of hope and despair! There to-day—as it was yesterday; as it would be, if they lived, to-morrow—there was the servant with Lucy’s newspaper and Clara’s newspaper in his hand!
Would both of them do again to-day what both had done so often in the days that were gone?
No! Mrs. Crayford removed the cover from her newspaper as usual. Clara laid her newspaper aside, unopened, on the garden seat.
In silence, Mrs. Crayford looked, where she always looked, at the column devoted to the Latest Intelligence from foreign parts. The instant her eye fell on the page she started with a loud cry of joy. The newspaper fell from her trembling hand. She caught Clara in her arms. “Oh, my darling! my darling! news of them at last.”
Without answering, without the slightest change in look or manner, Clara took the newspaper from the ground, and read the top line in the column, printed in capital letters:
THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
She waited, and looked at Mrs. Crayford.
“Can you bear to hear it, Lucy,” she asked, “if I read it aloud?”
Mrs. Crayford was too agitated to answer in words. She signed impatiently to Clara to go on.