Almost before the doctor finished his directions, Maurice was rushing downstairs....  That next half hour was a nightmare.  He ran up the street, slippery with ice; saw over a drug store the blue sign of the public telephone, and dashed in—­to wait interminably outside the booth!  A girl in a silly hat was drawling into the transmitter.  Once Maurice, pacing frantically up and down, heard her flat laugh; then, to his dismay, he saw her, through the glass of the door, instead of hanging up the receiver, drop a coin into the slot....

“Damn! Another five minutes!”

He turned and struck his fist on the counter.  “Why the devil don’t you have two booths here?” he demanded.

The druggist, lounging against the soda-water fountain, smiled calmly:  “You can search me.  Ask the company.”

“Can’t you stop that woman?  My business is important.  For God’s sake pull her out!”

“She’s telephoning her beau, I guess.  Who’s going to stop a lady telephoning her beau?  Not me.”

The feather gave a last flirtatious jerk—­and the booth was empty.

Maurice, closing its double doors, and shutting himself into the tiny box where the fetid air seemed to take him by the throat and the space was so narrow he could hardly crowd his long legs into it, rushed into another delay.  Wrong number! ...  When at last he got the right number and the hospital, there were the usual deliberate questions; and the, “I’ll connect you with So-and-so’s desk.”  Maurice, sitting with the receiver to his ear, could feel the blood pounding in his temples.  His mind whirled with the possibilities of what Lily might say in his absence:  “She’ll tell the doctor my name—­” As his wire was connected, first with one authority and then with another, each authority asked the same question, “Are you one of the family?” And to each he gave the same answer, “No; a friend; the doctor asked me to call you up.”

Finally came the voice of the “top man”—­the voice which had spoken in Lily’s narrow hall six years ago, the voice which had joked with Edith at the Mortons’ dinner party, the voice which had burst into extravagant guffaws under the silver poplar in his own garden—­Doctor Nelson’s voice—­curt, impersonal:  “Who is this speaking?”

Then Maurice’s voice, disguised into a gruff treble, “A friend.”

“One of the family?”

“No.”

Five minutes later Maurice, coming out of that horrible little booth, the matter arranged at an expense which, later, would give Jacky’s father some bad moments, was cold from head to foot.  When he reached Lily’s house the ambulance was waiting at the door.  Upstairs, the doctor said, “Well?”

And Lily said:  “Did you do it?  If you didn’t, I’ll—­”

“I did,” Maurice said.  Then he asked if he could be of any further service.

“No; the orderly will get him downstairs.  He’s too heavy for Mrs. Dale to carry.  She’s got her things all ready.  You—­” he said, smiling at Maurice, “Mr.—?  I didn’t get your name.  You look all in!”