If she had been allowed time to sit longer and digest and reflect she might have reached the point of deciding on what she would write to Lord Coombe. She had not the pen of a ready writer and it must be thought over. But just when she was beginning to be conscious of the pleasant warmth of the sun which shone on her shoulders from the window, she was almost startled our of her chair by hearing again stealing down the staircase from the upper regions that faint wail like a little cat’s. “Just the moment—the very _moment_ I begin to feel a little quieted—and try to think—she begins again!” she cried out. “It’s worse then _anything!_” Large crystal tears ran down her face and upon the polished table. “I suppose she would starve to death if I didn’t give her some food—and then _I_ should be blamed! People would be horrid about it. I’ve got nothing to eat myself.” She must at any rate manage to stop the crying before she could write to Coombe. She would be obliged to go down into the pantry and look for some condensed milk. The creature had no teeth but perhaps she could mumble a biscuit or a few raisins. If she could be made to swallow a little port wine it might make her sleepy. The sun was paying its brief morning visit to the kitchen and pantry when she reached there, but a few cockroaches scuttled away before her and made her utter a hysterical little scream. But there _was_ some condensed milk and there was a little warm water in a kettle because the fire was not quite out. She imperfectly mixed a decoction and filled a bottle which ought not to have been downstairs but had been brought and left there by Louisa as a result of tender moments with Edward. When she put the bottle and some biscuits and scraps of cold ham on a tray because she could not carry them all in her hands, her sense of outrage and despair made her almost sob. “I am just like a servant—carrying trays upstairs,” she wept. “I—I might be Edward—or—or Louisa.” And her woe increased when she added in the dining-room the port wine and nuts and raisins and macaroons as viands which _might_ somehow add to infant diet and induce sleep. She was not sure of course—but she knew they sucked things and liked sweets. A baby left unattended to scream itself to sleep and awakening to scream itself to sleep again, does not present to a resentful observer the flowerlike bloom and beauty of infancy. When Feather carried her tray into the Night Nursery and found herself confronting the disordered crib on which her offspring lay she felt the child horrible to look at. Its face was disfigured and its eyes almost closed. She trembled all over as she put the bottle to its mouth and saw the fiercely hungry clutch of its hands. It was old enough to clutch, and clutch it did, and suck furiously and starvingly—even though actually forced to stop once or twice at first to give vent to a thwarted remnant of a scream.