“I want you to look them over and talk with the mothers.  Dr. Hancock comes over when we send for him, but all these people are so delicate that I feel that they ought to have a physician’s eye on them all the time.”

“They have you pretty often, don’t they?”

“I go over every day either in the morning or the afternoon, and I give them advice about the babies, and teach them and Moya how to prepare their food, but they do such strange things that you can’t forestall because you never had the wildest idea that any woman in her senses would treat a baby so.”

Edward laughed.

“Russian and Bulgarian peasant customs, I suppose.  I never shall forget the first time I saw a two-day old negro baby sucking a bit of fat bacon.  I nearly had a chill.”

“Didn’t the child have a chill?”

“Not the slightest!  If they get ahead of you with some pleasing little trick like that you can console yourself with the thought that generally there is some basis of old-time experience that has shown it to be not so harmful as we are apt to think.”

“I’ve done enough tenement house work to know that the babies certainly survive extraordinary treatment, but these babies here are so delicate that they ought to have the most careful diet.  Most of them need real nursing.”

“Do you think your talks are making any impressions on the mothers?”

“Sometimes Mrs. Schuler and I think so, and just then it almost always happens that one of them does something totally unexpected that gives our hopes a terrible blow.”

“Let’s trust that this is a good day; I’d rather talk to you than work over a case this fine afternoon.”

Gertrude smiled at his tone and they walked on in silence out of the wood and across the brook and down the lane that brought them to the back of Rose House where the Club boys and girls were busy making a piece of furniture of some sort.  Mrs. Schuler was talking to Moya in the kitchen.

“I’ve brought Dr. Watkins to see everybody,” announced Miss Merriam gayly.  “Where are they all?”

“The ones who are at home are up in the pine grove, but Moya has just told me that Mrs. Paterno and her older boy and Mrs. Tsanoff and one of the twins have gone to town.”

“Walked?”

“Walked by the road on this scorching day!”

Miss Merriam turned to the doctor.

“This is one of the unexpected events we were just talking about.  Little Paterno is four and too large for that little woman to carry, and far too small and weak to take that long walk on his own legs even on a more suitable day than this, and the Tsanoff twins are just holding on to life by the tips of their fingers!”

She sat down in despair.  Dr. Watkins looked serious.

“Is there any way of heading them off or bringing them back.  Can we reach them anywhere by telephone?”

“No one knows where they can have gone.  It seems it must have been about an hour and a half ago that they started and I should think they’d be back before long if they’re able to come back—­”