“Well, little brother, you’re here, thank God.  And nobody knows how close we’ll be—­for a little while,” he thought.  “For we’re almost out of the world, you and I.”

* * * * *

Days passed, Deborah’s strength increased, and soon they let Roger come into the room.  She, too, was remote from the world for a time.  That great family outside was anxious no longer, it left her alone.  But soon it would demand her.  Never again, he told himself, would she be so close, so intimate, as here in her bed with this child of hers to whom she had given her father’s name.  “These hours are my real good-byes.”

Two long quiet weeks of this happiness, and then in a twinkling it was gone.  The child fell sick, within a few hours its small existence hung by a thread—­and to Roger’s startled eyes a new Deborah was revealed!  Tense and silent on her bed, her sensitive lips compressed with pain, her birthmark showing a jagged line of fiery red upon her brow as her ears kept straining to catch every sound from the nursery adjoining, through hours of stern anguish she became the kind of mother that she had once so dreaded—­shutting out everything else in the world:  people, schools, all other children, rich or poor, well, sick or dying!  Here was the crisis of Deborah’s life!

One night as she lay listening, with her hand gripping Roger’s tight, frowning abruptly she said to him, in a harsh, unnatural voice: 

“They don’t care any longer, none of them care! I’m safe and they’ve stopped worrying, for they know they’ll soon have me back at work!  The work,” she added fiercely, “that made my body what it is, not fit to bear a baby!” She threw a quick and tortured look toward the door of the other room.  “My work for those others, all those years, will be to blame if this one dies!  And if it doesn’t live I’m through!  I won’t go on!  I couldn’t!  I’d be too bitter after this—­toward all of them—­those children!”

These last two words were whispers so bitter they made Roger cold.

“But this child is going to live,” he responded hoarsely.  Its mother stared up with a quivering frown.  The next moment her limbs contracted as from an electric shock.  There had come a faint wail from the other room.

And this went on for three days and nights.  Again Roger lived as in a dream.  He saw haggard faces from time to time of doctors, nurses, servants.  He saw Allan now and then, his tall ungainly figure stooped, his features gaunt, his strong wide jaw set like a vise, but his eyes kind and steady still, his low voice reassuring.  And Roger noticed John at times hobbling quickly down a hall and stopping on his crutches before a closed door, listening.  Then these figures would recede, and it was as though he were alone in the dark.

At last the nightmare ended.  One afternoon as he sat in his study, Allan came in slowly and dropped exhausted into a chair.  He turned to Roger with a smile.