“I don’t know,” Lloyd told him.  “I don’t know.  Wait.  Go back.  I will let you know.”

Another fifteen minutes passed.  Lloyd fancied that the heart’s action was growing a little stronger.  A great stillness had settled over the house.  The two servants waiting Lloyd’s orders in the hall outside the door refrained even from whispering.  From the next room came the muffled sound of pacing footsteps, hurried, irregular, while with that strange perversity which seizes upon the senses at moments when they are more than usually acute Lloyd began to be aware of a vague, unwonted movement in the City itself, outside there behind the drawn curtains and half-opened window—­a faint, uncertain agitation, a trouble, a passing ripple on the still black pool of the night, coming and going, and coming again, each time a little more insistent, each time claiming a little more attention and notice.  It was about half past three o’clock.  But the little patient’s temperature was rising—­there could be no doubt about that.  The lungs expanded wider and deeper.  Hattie’s breathing was unmistakably easier; and as Lloyd put her fingers to the wrist she could hardly keep back a little exultant cry as she felt the pulse throbbing fuller, a little slower, a little more regularly.  Now she redoubled her attention.  Her hold upon the little life shut tighter; her power of resistance, her strength of purpose, seemed to be suddenly quadrupled.  She could imagine the Enemy drawing off; she could think that the grip of cold fingers was loosening.

Slowly the crisis passed off, slowly the reaction began.  Hattie was still unconscious, but there was a new look upon her face—­a look that Lloyd had learned to know from long experience, an intangible and most illusive expression, nothing, something, the sign that only those who are trained to search for it may see and appreciate—­the earliest faint flicker after the passing of the shadow.

“Will she live, will she live, nurse?” came Mr. Campbell’s whisper at her shoulder.

“I think—­I am almost sure—­but we must not be too certain yet.  Still there’s a chance; yes, there’s a chance.”

Campbell, suddenly gone white, put out his hand and leaned a moment against the mantelpiece.  He did not now leave the room.  The door-bell rang.

“Dr. Street,” murmured Lloyd.

But what had happened in the City?  There in the still dark hours of that hot summer night an event of national, perhaps even international, importance had surely transpired.  It was in the air—­a sense of a Great Thing come suddenly to a head somewhere in the world.  Footsteps sounded rapidly on the echoing sidewalks.  Here and there a street door opened.  From corner to corner, growing swiftly nearer, came the cry of newsboys chanting extras.  A subdued excitement was abroad, finding expression in a vague murmur, the mingling of many sounds into one huge note—­a note that gradually swelled and grew louder and seemed to be rising from all corners of the City at once.