"He'll _have_ to be taken away! Besides, he'll have ten times better care in the hospital than he could have here." "Can she go with him?" Maurice said. "Why, if she can afford to take a private room--" "Good heavens! money's no object; anything to keep her from doing some wild thing!" "You a relation?" the doctor asked. "Not the slightest. I--knew her husband." "The thing for you to do," said the doctor, "is to hustle right out to a telephone; call up the hospital. Get Doctor Nelson, if you can--" "Nelson!" "Yes; if not, get Baker; tell him I--" then followed concise directions; "But try and get Nelson; he's the top man. They're frightfully crowded, and if you fool with understrappers, you'll get turned down. I'd do it, but I've got to stay here and see that she doesn't get perfectly crazy." Almost before the doctor finished his directions, Maurice was rushing downstairs.... That next half hour was a nightmare. He ran up the street, slippery with ice; saw over a drug store the blue sign of the public telephone, and dashed in--to wait interminably outside the booth! A girl in a silly hat was drawling into the transmitter. Once Maurice, pacing frantically up and down, heard her flat laugh; then, to his dismay, he saw her, through the glass of the door, instead of hanging up the receiver, drop a coin into the slot.... "Damn! _Another_ five minutes!" He turned and struck his fist on the counter. "Why the devil don't you have two booths here?" he demanded. The druggist, lounging against the soda-water fountain, smiled calmly: "You can search _me_. Ask the company." "Can't you stop that woman? My business is important. For God's sake pull her out!" "She's telephoning her beau, I guess. Who's going to stop a lady telephoning her beau? Not me." The feather gave a last flirtatious jerk--and the booth was empty. Maurice, closing its double doors, and shutting himself into the tiny box where the fetid air seemed to take him by the throat and the space was so narrow he could hardly crowd his long legs into it, rushed into another delay. Wrong number! ... When at last he got the right number and the hospital, there were the usual deliberate questions; and the, "I'll connect you with So-and-so's desk." Maurice, sitting with the receiver to his ear, could feel the blood pounding in his temples. His mind whirled with the possibilities of what Lily might say in his absence: "She'll tell the doctor my name--" As his wire was connected, first with one authority and then with another, each authority asked the same question, "Are you one of the family?" And to each he gave the same answer, "No; a friend; the doctor asked me to call you up."