Of course by this time the alarm was general. The young doctor was supported, at Robert Ferguson's insistence, by an old doctor, who, if he was awed by his patient, at least did not show it. He was even courageous enough to bring a nurse along with him. "Miss Baker will spare your daughter," he said, soothingly, when Sarah Maitland, seeing the strange figure in her bedroom, had declared she wouldn't have a fussing woman about. "Miss Nannie needs help," the doctor said. Mrs. Maitland frowned, and yielded. But the nurse did not have a good time. In her stiffly starched skirt, with her little cap perched on her head, she went fluttering prettily about, watched all the while by the somber, half-shut eyes. She moved the furniture, she dusted the bureau, she arranged the little row of photographs; and then she essayed to smooth Mrs. Maitland's hair--it was the last straw. The big, gray head began to lift slowly; a trembling finger pointed at the girl; there was only one word: "_Stop_." The startled nurse stopped,--so abruptly that she almost lost her balance. "Clear out. You can sit in the hall. When I want you, I'll let you know." Miss Baker fled, and Mrs. Maitland apparently forgot her. When the doctor came, however, she roused herself to say: "I won't have that fool girl buzzing round. I don't like all this highfalootin' business of nurses, anyhow. They are nothing but foolish expense." Perhaps that last word stirred some memory, for she added abruptly: "Nannie, bring me that--that picture you have in the parlor. The Virgin Mary, you know. Rags of popery, but I want to look at it. No; I can't pay $5,000 for 14 X 18 inches of old master, and hire nurses to curl my hair, too!" But nobody smiled at her joke. When Nannie brought the picture, she bade her put it on a chair by the bedside, and sometimes the two girls saw her look at it intently. "I think she likes the child," Elizabeth said, in a low voice; but Nannie sighed, and said, "No; she is provoked because Blair was extravagant." After Miss Baker's banishment, Elizabeth did most of the waiting on her, for Nannie's anxious timidity made her awkward to the point of being, as Mrs. Maitland expressed it, wearily, "more bother than she was worth." Once she asked where Blair was, and Elizabeth said that nobody knew. "He heard of some business opening, Mrs. Maitland, and went East to see about it." "Went East? What did he go East for? He's got a business opening at home, right under his nose," she said, thickly.