The nurse stood near him, silent, but she looked away from the cot. "Hydrocephalus!" murmured O'Connell, staring at his tiny patient, "hydrocephalus, without a doubt. Eh? nurse!" "Yes, perhaps! I don't know, doctor." "Oh, not a doubt of it, not a doubt," repeated O'Connell, and then came a flicker of the child's eyelids and a weak crumpling of the tiny hand. O'Connell caught his breath and clawed at his beard. "Hydrocephalus," he muttered with set jaw and drawn eyebrows. The tiny hand straightened with a movement that suggested the recovery of crushed grass, the mouth opened in a microscopic yawn, and then the eyelids were slowly raised and a steady unwavering stare of profoundest intelligence met O'Connell's gaze. He clenched his hands, shifted in his chair, and then rose abruptly and turned to the window. "I--it won't be necessary for me to come again, nurse," he said curtly; "they are both doing perfectly well." "Not come again?" There was dismay in the nurse's question. "No! No! It's unnecessary ..." He broke off, and made for the door without another glance in the direction of the cot. Nurse followed him downstairs. "If I'm wanted--you can easily send for me," said O'Connell, as he went out. As he moved away he dragged at his beard and murmured: "Hydrocephalus, not a doubt of it." Following his departure, Mrs. Reade heard curious and most unwonted laughter, and cautiously blundered downstairs to investigate. She found the nurse in an advanced condition of hysteria, laughing, gurgling, weeping, and intermittently crying in a shrill voice: "Oh! Lord have mercy; Lord ha' mercy!" "Now, see you 'ere, my dear," said Mrs. Reade, when nurse had been recovered to a red-eyed sanity, "it's time she was told. I've never 'eld with keepin' it from 'er, myself, and I've 'ad more experience than many...." Mrs. Reade argued with abundant recourse to parenthesis. "Is she strog edough?" asked the nurse, still with tears in her voice; "cad she bear the sight of hib?" She blew her nose vigorously, and then continued with greater clearness: "I'm afraid it may turn her head." Out of her deep store of wisdom, Mrs. Reade produced a fact which she elaborated and confirmed by apt illustration, adducing more particularly the instance of Mrs. Harrison's third. "She's 'is mother," was the essence of her argument, a fact of deep and strange significance. The nurse yielded, and so the circumstance of Stott's household was changed, and Stott himself was once more able to come home to meals. The nurse, wisely, left all diplomacy to the capable Mrs. Reade, a woman specially fitted by nature for the breaking of news. She delivered a long, a record-breaking circumlocution, and it seemed that Ellen Mary, who lay with closed eyes, gathered no hint of its import. But when the impressive harangue was slowly rustling to collapse like an exhausted balloon, she opened her eyes and said quite clearly, "What's wrong with 'im, then?"