When Emily got out of the frowzy day coach in which she had made the last stage of her long journey from Washington and glanced along the station platform, a sense of her loneliness, made more acute because the ugly scene was otherwise homelike and familiar, rolled over her. She had wired Doctor Larkin from Olney, where she had left the St. Louis sleeper, but no one was there to meet her, not even old Jasper. She gasped at this last of all the evil portents of the twenty-four hours that had dragged by like so many weeks since she bade Jerome good by in Washington--her father must be worse, they could not leave him. The night was cold, with a dampness that pierced her marrow, after the foul atmosphere of the overheated car. It had been snowing; some of the heavy saturated flakes lay in patches, but now a fine mist was falling, and the greasy boards of the station platform shone in all the reflected lights of the tired and panting train. With the weary nurse and the healthy baby that slept through all these trials in which it was not as yet his lot to share, she clambered into the old hack that always stood there, and there was something of a welcome in the face of the driver as he held the door a moment to inquire: "To Mr. Harkness's, ma'am?" He slammed the door and they rattled away. She was glad that he had spoken of her father as one still alive, and all the way home, as they went lurching and splashing through the December mud that mired the streets, she built her hopes upon this little omen. The old house was dark, and the trees in the yard stirred mournfully in the winds that were creeping up from the west. One dim light shone normally in the hall, but another, unusual and sinister, shone in the room above--her father's room. The window was closed--she was glad of that. Both of the lights were so dim that they seemed only to point the gloom that had settled stilly on the whole place. The doctor, coming forward with the soft tread and monitory finger of the sick room, met her in the hall. She rushed to him, and seized his hand. "He's alive?" The doctor smiled with professional reassurance. "Yes, he's better this evening. I've told him you were coming." Tears came into her eyes and moistened the veil she hurriedly unwound. She tore off her wraps, and laid her hat on the hall tree. She rubbed her palms briskly together, pressed her fingers to her hair and her temples, and then: "I'll go to him at once." She started for the stairs, but paused there, leaning wearily on the baluster. "What is it, Doctor, tell me?" "Well," the medical man said, "a general collapse. He was out Wednesday, and it rained, and he caught cold. Thursday he developed a bad attack of the grippe--and his heart action is weak, you know. He would not give up." "No, that was like him," said Emily, as people always say of their loved ones at such a time, in the effort to recognize their strong qualities ere it be too late.