"That is all very well," I remarked. "But that is not the point. What I want to know is--and I intend to have an answer--whose doing it was that I was not sent for yesterday morning?--that I was kept in utter ignorance of the most important event that has ever occurred in my family--when, for all you people did to prevent it, my daughter might have died without my seeing her again!" We were now in the little first-floor sitting-room, just off the stairs. It was between three and four, and the luncheon things were not cleared away. Indeed the house seemed completely disorganised, having no one to look after it. Old Mrs. Juke, who did not seem to notice this, stood just within the door, puffing like a porpoise, and trying to look dignified, which was quite impossible. "I am very sorry you take it in this way," she said, in a hoity-toity tone. "We may have made a mistake, but, if we did, we made it with the best intentions. All we thought of was to save you useless pain. We knew your nervous, anxious temperament, and how keenly you feel anything affecting your children; and so we decided----" "It was not a matter for you to decide," I broke in, with natural asperity. "I am neither a baby nor an idiot. I have at least as much sense as any one in this house--I should be sorry for myself, indeed, if I had not--and I prefer to attend to my own business, if it's all the same to you. Whether I should be here, or whether I should not, was for _me_ to say--for me and for my daughter. She, I am very certain, had no part in shutting me out; and she ought to have been considered, if I was not." "It was she," said Mrs. Juke, "who wished it most. Her one desire was to spare you." "I don't believe it." "I am sorry if you don't believe it." The old thing shook like blancmange in hot weather. "I can only say that it is perfectly true." "I will ask her if it is true--that she wished to have strangers with her in place of her own mother." I started to cross the landing to Phyllis's room, and my teeth were set, and my heart was thumping with an emotion that I could scarcely control--but I need not say I did control it. Mrs. Juke hung on to me to stop me, pleading that Phyllis and the baby were fast asleep together, and must not be disturbed; and I asked her how she, who had been a mother fifteen times, could insult a mother by supposing that she would be less careful of a sick child than anybody else. If I had gone in alone I am sure she would not have heard me--Tom says that I walk about the house as if shod with feathers--but Mrs. Juke would come too, and there was no hushing that solid tread. I saw my darling start up from the pillow, frightened out of her sleep by the noise, and the flush come into her cheeks. And Mrs. Juke cried "There!" reproachfully, as if it had been my fault. At the same moment another stranger came out of Edmund's dressing-room, and turned upon me like a perfect fury.