she said with the fright in her eyes again. “No! I must not sleep till I am ready to go. Oh, won’t he come soon?” she cried out in her agony.
“As soon as he can,” answered Constance, “but—he said he would be praying!” She said it brightly, as if prayer now would work some charm, as if she herself believed it would, and then wondered at herself. She had been wont to sneer at prayer; some professor in the early days of her scholastic career had once remarked that the only benefit of prayer was its reflex influence upon the one who prayed. But now she held it out as a charm that would relieve.
“Pray!” said Doris. “Oh, I never knew how to pray! I used to say ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on,’ but that isn’t real praying, is it? I wish I knew how to pray now. Oh, Connie, do you think he really will pray for me?”
“I’m sure he will,” said Constance, looked at her watch, and began to calculate the time. If he should catch the next train after he hung up the receiver—which was scarcely likely; there was still a little over three hours before it was due in the nearby city, and then he would have to wait for a local train—or perhaps he would be thoughtful enough to hire a taxi if he couldn’t make good connections at once. It was the very soonest she could hope to expect him. Oh, would he be too late? Could Doris hold out till then? She was perceptibly failing now, moment by moment, even to Constance’s inexperienced eyes. Would she have it always to remember that Doris died needing comfort that she could not give? Surely as Seagrave had said, if she only knew where to look, there must be somebody who would know the way of life!
But when she thought of all the people in the college and in the village whom she knew at all, there was no one whom she could ask to come here and try to talk to Doris. But wait! There was the janitor. He had a Testament. Would he perhaps know how to pray?
Yet when she tried to imagine him here in this room in his overalls, kneeling beside Doris’s bed, she didn’t know whether it would do or not. She wished she had told Emil about Doris and asked him to pray for her, only she was so unused to talking of such things it had never occurred to her.
Suddenly Doris spoke. “‘God so loved the world,’” she said slowly, sharply. “Yes, but that’s good people, I suppose. I’ve not been good. I’ve never thought a thing about God, not since I was a little girl and had a nurse once who tried to teach me to pray and I wouldn’t. I guess He would have no use for me after that. It’s probably only good people He loves.”
“It says the world,” said Constance, reasoning her way uncertainly. “There are more bad people than good people in the world. It takes them both to make up the world. It must mean both. Listen. You lie still and I’ll read it again, and you just try to believe it, the way he sent you word to.”
Constance read the words slowly, impressively through again, taking in their wondrous beauty and fullness as she read, wondering why she had never read them before, nor known how much they contained, thinking in her subconscious mind that if she ever came through this awful experience she would never be the same carefree girl again. Life could never be the same after this.
And then, just as she was turning the page back to read the verse over again because Doris was less restless when she read, the door opened and Seagrave stood beside her!
“Oh, you have
come
!” she quivered, a great joy and relief in her voice. “How could you get here so soon?”
He gave her a fleeting grave smile and said quietly, “I flew, of course,” and then he turned toward the bed where Doris’s great, frightened eyes were watching him.
Constance came closer to her friend.
“This is Mr. Seagrave, Doris. He knows how to tell you what to do.”
Seagrave’s face lit up with one of his tender smiles.
“Well, little sister,” he
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