The car went on before she reached the hall and what she heard, she did not believe. It was Nora’s voice calling. “Mummie! Mummie! Aren’t you home?”
There she was, running up the walk, the way she always did, and Mrs. Conner felt things start to go black because she did not, could not believe. But there was a car, going away, a colored girl at the wheel, and it wasn’t quite the same Nora, coming up the steps on her spidery legs. She wore a different coat, too small for her, and a dress Beth didn’t recognize. Her hat was missing and one side of her long bob had been chopped off short. There was a big pad of bandage on her right cheek. Mrs. Conner still wasn’t absolutely sure, until she felt Nora in her arms.
“We thought—” she started to say.
Nora leaned back and looked up. “I had one hell of a time, I really did!” Nora said.
Henry didn’t get home till evening.
15
Outside of the place where Washington had been—far outside—in a big house that had belonged to a famous eighteenth-Century American, some fifty men held a meeting in the lamp-lit drawing room. The men came there by automobile, mostly; but three or four walked, and one arrived as the original householder often had, riding on a horse. Some of the men wore bandages, two were brought on stretchers, and all of them had to go through a considerable process of identification at check points around the estate. Bayoneted rifles and even cannon bristled on every hand.
When they had assembled, when they had waited for an hour beyond the agreed time—and greeted a few additional arrivals with quiet joy—a man who wore the white garments of a doctor, and around whose neck a stethoscope hung, said to a man in slacks and a tweed jacket,
“Mr. President….” The man shook his head. “I haven’t taken the oath yet.”
The doctor shrugged. “Mr. Gates, then. I think you ought to have the meeting soon, if possible. The Secretary of State is slipping fast.”