The tragic change in the Irishwoman's face as she looked at their darling, their anguished community of feeling--there was instantly a bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing differences between them. Lydia felt herself--as she rarely did--not alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. "'Stashie, you don't--you don't think she's--_sick?_" She brought the word out with horrified difficulty. 'Stashie was running down the back stairs. "I'm 'phonin' to th' little ould doctor," she called over her shoulder. Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia's terror, she had sunk into a stupor. The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby's bed with white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her temperature. "Just turn her so she'll lie comfortably," he told 'Stashie, "and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your mistress." In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to summon her strength. "Are you fit to be a mother?" he asked harshly. "Wait a minute," said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the balustrade. "Yes," she answered. "Ariadne's very sick. I oughtn't to have allowed you to wean her with hot weather coming on. You'd better wire Paul." "Yes," she said, not blenching. "What else can I do?" "'Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest drug store for me. I'll go back to her now." "Is she--is she--dangerously--?" asked Lydia in a low, steady voice. "Yes; she is," he said unsparingly. The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: "Ariadne suddenly taken very sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much, though she seems to. When shall I expect you?" The answer she received in a few hours read: "Have two nurses. Get Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave." It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the little bed to say, irrelevantly, "Peterson, of Toledo, would be better than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it's simple enough--damnably simple." He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called by a patient at the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying noiselessly upon her errand.