A serious-faced nurse took charge of them, and she and Chris followed her noiselessly into the familiar bedroom that yet looked so altered in its new lifeless order and emptiness. The clutter of personal possessions was already gone, chairs had been straightened and pushed back, and on the bed that had lately been frilled and embroidered in white and pink, and piled with foolish little transparent baby pillows, a fresh, flawless linen sheet was spread. Silence reigned in the wide chamber; but two doctors were standing by the window, and looked at the newcomers with interest, and a second nurse passed them on her way out. Norma vaguely noted the fire, burning clear and bright, the shaded light that showed a chart, on a cleared table, the absence of flowers and plants that made the place seem bare. But after one general impression her attention was riveted upon the sick woman, and with her heart beating quickly with fright she went to stand at the foot of the great walnut bed. Mrs. Melrose was lying with her head tipped back in pillows; her usually gentle, soft old face looked hard and lined, and was a dark red, and the scanty gray hair, brushed back mercilessly from the temples, and devoid of the usual puffs and transformations, made her look her full sixty years. Her eyes were half-open, but she did not move them, her lips seemed very dry, and occasionally she muttered restlessly, and a third nurse, bending above her, leaned anxiously near, to catch what she said, and perhaps murmur a soothing response. This nurse looked sharply at Norma, and breathed rather than whispered: "Mrs. Sheridan?" and when Norma answered with a nod, nodded herself in satisfaction. "She's been asking and asking for you," she said, in a low clear tone that oddly broke the unnatural silence of the room. Norma, hearing a stir behind her, looked back to see that both doctors had come over to the bed, and were looking down at their patient with a profound concern that their gray heads and their big spectacles oddly emphasized. "Mrs. Sheridan?" one of them questioned. Norma dared not use her voice, and nodded again. Immediately the doctor leaned over Mrs. Melrose, and said in a clear and encouraging tone: "Here is Mrs. Sheridan now!" Mrs. Melrose merely moaned heavily in answer, and Norma said softly, to the doctor who had spoken: "I think perhaps she was asking for my aunt--who is also Mrs. Sheridan!" Before the doctor, gravely considering, could answer, the sick woman startled them all by saying, almost fretfully, in a surprisingly clear and quiet voice: "No--no--no, I want you, Norma!" She groped blindly about with her hand, as she spoke, and Norma kneeled down, and covered it with both her own. Mrs. Melrose immediately began to breathe more easily, and sank at once into the stupor from which she had only momentarily roused.