Crimson Roses (Musaicum Romance Classics). Grace Livingston Hill

      CHAPTER I

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      The room was very still except for the ticking of the little clock, which stood on the table in the hall and seemed to Marion Warren to be tolling out the seconds one by one.

      She sat by her father's bedside, where she had been all day, only rising to give him his medicine, or to tiptoe into the hall to answer some question of her sister-in-law's, or to speak to the doctor before he went out.

      The doctor had been there three times since morning. He had come in the last time without being sent for. Marion felt sure that he knew the end was not far off although he had not definitely said so. As she looked at the gray shadows in the beloved face her own heart told her that her dear father had not much longer now to stay.

      She would not call him back if she could to the suffering he had endured for the last two years. She knew he desired to be through with it. He had often spoken about how good it would be to feel that the suffering was all over. Yet she had hoped against hope that he might be cured and given back to her. She had nursed him so gladly, and loved her task, even when sometimes her head ached and her back ached and her slender arms ached, and her flesh fairly cried out for rest. Her father was almost her idol. He and she had always understood one another and had had the same dreams and ambitions. He had encouraged her in taking more time for reading and study than her more practical mother had thought wise. He had talked with her of life and what we were put on this earth to do. He had hunted out books to please and interest her. She had read aloud to him for hours at a time, and they had discussed what she read. And after her mother died he had been both mother and father to her. How was she going to live without her father?

      She had known, of course, since he was first taken ill, that there was a possibility that he might not get well. But he had been so cheery and hopeful always, never complaining, never taking it as a foregone conclusion that he was out of active life forever, and always saying at night:

      "Well, daughter, I feel a little better to-night, I think. Perhaps the doctor will let me sit up in the morning. Wouldn't that be great? "

      Yet he had also lived and talked as if he might always be going to heaven to-morrow. Once he had said:

      "Well, I'm satisfied to live to be a very old man, if the Lord wills, or to go right now whenever He calls."

      These memories went pacing before the thoughts of the girl like weird shadows as she sat waiting in the darkened room, watching the dear white face. She had had no sleep since the night before last when her father had grown suddenly so very much worse. At intervals she wondered whether she were not perhaps a little light-headed now.

      Marion's brother Tom was sitting at the foot of the bed by the open hall door. He had been sitting there for an hour and a half. Occasionally he cleared his throat with a rasping sound. She knew he must be suffering of course, yet somehow she felt that she alone was the one that was being bereaved. Tom was older, and was not what he called "sentimental." He had never understood the deep attachment between Marion and her father. He sometimes had called it partiality, but the girl always knew her father had not been partial. He loved Tom deeply. Yet he had never been able to make a friend and comrade of his practical, cheery, and somewhat impatient son. The son never had time to read and talk with his father. He had always had some scheme on hand, to which he must rush off. He was like his bustling, practical mother, who even in her last illness had kept the details of the house and neighborhood in mind and sent others on continual errands to see this and that carried out as she planned. It was just a difference in temperament, perhaps. Marion wondered idly if Tom was thinking now how he might have made his father happier by being with him more. Tom loved their father, of course.

      But Tom sat silently, dutifully, and now and then changed his position, or cleared his throat. He seemed so self-possessed.

      Marion was glad that he sat there. She would not have liked to have the responsibility alone. Tom had always been kind when it occurred to him. It did not always occur to him.

      Jennie was there too, Tom's wife. She did not sit down but hovered in and out. Marion wished she would either go or stay. It somehow seemed like an interruption to have her so uneasy. It was just another thing to bear to hear her soft slipping around in felt slippers, calling Tom to the door to ask about some matter of household need, asking in that sepulchral whisper if there had been any change yet. Marion shuddered inwardly. It seemed somehow as if Jennie would be eager for the change to come. As if there were no sacredness to her in their father's dying. Yet that father had been exceedingly kind to Jennie. He had always treated her as if she were his own.

      It was during one of these visits of Jennie to the sickroom that there seemed to come a change over the shadows on the white face. Jennie had breathed a syllable emphasizing it as it came, as some people will always make vocal a self-evident fact. Marion