“Oh! my baby.  I know something’s happened to the baby and they’ve come to tell me.”

Mrs. Lester’s words rang high and shrill.  They changed to a shriek as Dicky opened the door and fell back startled.

For past him rushed a girl with a fear-distorted face holding in her arms a baby that to my eyes looked as if it were dead.

But I had presence of mind enough to quiet Mrs. Lester’s hysterical fears.

“That is not your baby,” I said sharply, grasping her by the arm.  “It is the child from across the hall!”

There is nothing in the world so pitiful to witness as the suffering of a baby.

We all realized this as the maid held out to us the tiny infant, rigid and blue as if it were already dead.

“Is the baby dead?” she gasped, her face convulsed with grief and fear.  “My madam is at the theatre, and the baby has been fretty for two hours, and just a minute ago he stiffened out like this.  Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!” she began to sob.

“Stop that!” Lillian Gale’s voice rang out like a trumpet.  “The baby is not dead.  It is in a convulsion.  Give it to me and run back to your apartment and bring me some warm blankets.”

Of the six people at our little chafing dish supper, so suddenly interrupted, she was the only one who knew what to do.  I had been able to, quiet Mrs. Lester’s hysteria by telling her at once that the baby was not her own, as she had so widely imagined, but was helpless before the baby’s danger.

Lillian’s orders came thick and fast.  She dominated the situation and swept us along in the fight to save the baby’s life until the doctor, who had been summoned, arrived.

The physician was a tall, thin, young man, with a look of efficiency about him.  He looked at the baby carefully, laid his hand upon the tiny forehead, then straightened himself.

“Is there any way in which the child’s parents can be found?” Mr. Underwood evidently had told him of the nature of the seizure and the absence of the parents on the way up.

Lillian Gale’s face grew pale under her rouge.

“There is danger, doctor?” she asked quietly

“There is always danger in these cases,” he returned quietly, but his words were heard by a wild-eyed woman in evening dress who rushed through the open door followed by a man as agitated as she.

I said an unconscious prayer of thankfulness.

The baby’s mother had arrived.

It seemed a week, but it was in reality only two hours later when Lillian Gale returned from the apartment across the hall, heavy eyed and dishevelled, her gown splashed with water, her rouge rubbed off in spots, her whole appearance most disreputable.

“The baby?” we all asked at once.

“Out of any immediate danger, the doctor says.  The nurse came an hour ago, but the child had two more of those awful things, and I was able to help her.  The mother is no good at all, one of those emotional women whose idea of taking care of a baby is to shriek over it.”