In the morning-room they found Juley strangely uplifted. And when each had clung to her in turn, she addressed them starry-eyed and lyrical.

“My beloved children,” she said quietly, “it has pleased Our Heavenly Father to lay His hand upon us all, and to try our faith, whether it be faith indeed. He has taken your earthly Father to Himself. We can only pray for strength and look for our refuge in Him. For He is our Refuge and our Strength in time of trouble. Let us pray to Him now, together, that I, my darlings, may be given the strength to be to you father and mother both, until it pleases Him in His great mercy to take me also to Himself. Let us pray to the Father of the fatherless.”

Upon this the tears gushed from her eyes; and she would have knelt down with them at the sofa. But Georgie refused.

“I won’t pray to your God!” she cried out at the pitch of her voice. “If it pleases Him for Father to die, like this, away from us all, I don’t love Him. I hate your God! My God is quite different. I’ll go and pray to my God. He’ll know that you can’t ever make up to me for Father. Oh! I can’t bear it!” and she rushed from the room.

“Poor Georgie!” said Juley. “God the Maker of our hearts speaks to us all in different ways.” And with the remaining children she poured herself forth in prayer.

When at length she had left the boys in Joanna’s charge, none of them spoke for a few moments. Then in the gaping chasm of silence Linnet moved diffidently to where his interrupted work still lay on the carpet, and he picked up a streamer of blue paper.

“I suppose we may as well finish making our fire-balloon, Sholto,” he remarked.

Now the tears sprang to Joanna’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. It was not that she felt any real, personal loss. But something in her little brothers’ aspect made her see them suddenly as fatherless.

“Oh, Linnet!” she exclaimed, striving for a degree of realization. “Think! We’ll never hear Father blow his nose again like a trumpet in the lobby when he comes home at night.”

“And he’ll never be Lord Provost now, either,” appended Sholto morosely, “with the two lamp-posts in front of our door.”

Linnet nodded, seeing the tragedy in this. And in deference to it, he kept to himself his bitter disappointment about the look of the cable.

VII

But it was Georgie who was wakened in the small hours of the morning, and taken to her mother’s bedside to play the daughter’s part there. They had had to send for the doctor at midnight; and Aunt Georgina had not been able to lie down, nor even to take off her dress. She was grim with weariness and sorrow.