Thus the melancholy days went on. Grace had begun to feel something fatal in the air, but Milly had not yet gone farther than the fact that papa was very ill, and that it might be weeks before he was well again, when Dr Brewer came into their room after his nightly visit. They had been trying to eat something, which they simply acknowledged as a duty, but did not know how to get through. Their meals were the most dreadful moments of their day, the only things that marked its melancholy course. The doctor came in, not hurriedly, as he usually did. He drew a chair to the table and sat down beside them. “What are you having--tea? I never told you to take tea,” he said. “It is so easy to take,” Milly pleaded, “far easier than anything else.” “In the meantime you must have some wine,” he said, ringing the bell; “yes, yes, you must take it whether you like it or not. Now tell me a little about yourselves, as I have some time to myself to-night. My wife was talking of coming to see you. I have never heard anything about your friends in London. It is time to think of looking them up----” “That means papa is better,” said Milly. “I knew it from the first moment, as soon as I saw the doctor’s kind face.” He turned his kind face away from them with a forced smile. He could not bear to meet their anxious eyes. “But we have no friends--not to call friends,” said Grace, who was not quite so sure as Milly, and yet was so glad to take Milly’s opinion for this once. “We have letters to quantities of people, and some of them we have seen at home. There is Lord Conway,” she said with a little hesitation--“he once stayed at our house. It is a long time ago, but we thought--oh, we did not want him to ask us, especially since papa has been ill. It would be dreadful to have a long illness in a stranger’s house.” “Lord Conway!” Dr Brewer said, bewildered. “But we don’t know him, not as you know your friends,” Grace made haste to add; “we don’t know any one in that way. They are all people who have been in Canada, or the friends of people who have been in Canada.” The doctor shook his head. “Do you mean that you know nobody, my poor dear children? You have no _friends_--people who really are acquainted with you, who would take a little trouble for you, whom you could have recourse to----” Here he stopped, confused, feeling Grace’s eye upon him. “I thought you might have--relations even, on this side of the water,” he said. “Whom we could have recourse to!” said Grace--“oh, doctor, tell us, tell us what you mean! Why should we want to have recourse to any one? That means more than ordinary words----”