“The pulse is even above 140.  Oh!  Esther, will he have to go through that again?”

“No, David, no.  See, he’s asleep.  Put him here.  You look like a ghost.  Go right to bed.  To-morrow will be a trying day.  Davy is tired out.  To be sure, he must be worse when he is tired.”

“Does the doctor come at all in the night?”

“Why, no, of course not.  It is a chronic case now, he says.  It requires the same treatment.”

The voice is soft consoling and sympathetic.  The man is as tired as Davy.

“We ought not to have had the folks here,” he says.

“No,” says Esther.

“I wish the stove were up,” he thinks.

“I wish David were not in politics,” the woman thinks.

There is in and about that chamber, then, the sleep of a tired man, the whistling of a cold and hostile wind, such as few cities know, the half-sleeping vigil of a troubled woman, and the increasing shrillness of Davy’s breathing.

“It sounds like croup to me,” she whispers to herself.  “It has always sounded like croup to me.  I wonder if it could be diphtheria?  I wonder what I ought to do?  But David needs sleep so badly!  I’m sorry I had the company.  I told David I was afraid of the child’s health.  But David needed the music.  Music rested him, he said.”

The milk-wagons are rattling along the street once more.  Will they never cease?  The man awakes with a start.

“What is that?” he demands.  He has just dreamed how he treated 150 people to cigars and drinks on the day Dr. Floddin brought Davy through.  He has been walking with Davy among the animals in Lincoln Park.  “There’s Santa Claus’ horses,” said Davy, of the elks.

There is a loud noise in the room.

“What on earth is it?” he asks.  He is only partly awake.

“It is poor little Davy,” Esther answers.  “Oh, David!” The woman is sobbing.  She herself has awakened her husband.

The man is out of bed in an instant.  The room is cold.  There is no stove.  There is no stramonium.  There is no flaxseed.  There is no hot water.

It is not the lack of these appliances that drives Lockwin into his panic.  He may keep his courage by storming about these misadventures.

But in his heart—­in his logic—­there is no hope.

He hastens to the drug store.  He has alarmed the household.

“Davy is dying!” he has said, brutally.

The drug clerk is a sound sleeper.  “Let them rattle a little while,” he soliloquizes with professional tranquillity.

“Child down again?” he inquires later on, in a conciliatory voice.  “Wouldn’t give him any more of that emetic if it was my child.  I’ve re-filled that bottle three times now.”

The stove must be gotten up.  The pipe enters the mantel.  There, that will insure a hot poultice.  But why does the thing throw out gas?  Why didn’t it do that before?