“Oh, Mr. Ellis,” exclaimed Clara, coming toward him with both hands extended, “can nothing be done to stop this terrible affair?”

“I wish I could do something,” he murmured fervently, taking both her trembling hands in his own broad palms, where they rested with a surrendering trustfulness which he has never since had occasion to doubt.  “It has gone too far, already, and the end, I fear, is not yet; but it cannot grow much worse.”  The editor hurried upstairs.  Mrs. Carteret, wearing a worried and haggard look, met him at the threshold of the nursery.

“Dodie is ill,” she said.  “At three o’clock, when the trouble began, I was over at Mrs. Albright’s,—­I had left Virgie with the baby.  When I came back, she and all the other servants had gone.  They had heard that the white people were going to kill all the negroes, and fled to seek safety.  I found Dodie lying in a draught, before an open window, gasping for breath.  I ran back to Mrs. Albright’s,—­I had found her much better to-day,—­and she let her nurse come over.  The nurse says that Dodie is threatened with membranous croup.”

“Have you sent for Dr. Price?”

“There was no one to send,—­the servants were gone, and the nurse was afraid to venture out into the street.  I telephoned for Dr. Price, and found that he was out of town; that he had gone up the river this morning to attend a patient, and would not be back until to-morrow.  Mrs. Price thought that he had anticipated some kind of trouble in the town to-day, and had preferred to be where he could not be called upon to assume any responsibility.”

“I suppose you tried Dr. Ashe?”

“I could not get him, nor any one else, after that first call.  The telephone service is disorganized on account of the riot.  We need medicine and ice.  The drugstores are all closed on account of the riot, and for the same reason we couldn’t get any ice.”

Major Carteret stood beside the brass bedstead upon which his child was lying,—­his only child, around whose curly head clustered all his hopes; upon whom all his life for the past year had been centred.  He stooped over the bed, beside which the nurse had stationed herself.  She was wiping the child’s face, which was red and swollen and covered with moisture, the nostrils working rapidly, and the little patient vainly endeavoring at intervals to cough up the obstruction to his breathing.

“Is it serious?” he inquired anxiously.  He had always thought of the croup as a childish ailment, that yielded readily to proper treatment; but the child’s evident distress impressed him with sudden fear.

“Dangerous,” replied the young woman laconically.  “You came none too soon.  If a doctor isn’t got at once, the child will die,—­and it must be a good doctor.”

“Whom can I call?” he asked.  “You know them all, I suppose.  Dr. Price, our family physician, is out of town.”

“Dr. Ashe has charge of his cases when he is away,” replied the nurse.  “If you can’t find him, try Dr. Hooper.  The child is growing worse every minute.  On your way back you’d better get some ice, if possible.”