with a tin-pail, after the milkman.  Evidently his mother wanted some extra milk.  The sun was reflected on the sides of the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy.  Why was not Willy Royce’s mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply sending for extra milk?  The health and the daily swing of the world in its arc of space seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself.  She left the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly wore mornings.  Then she sat by the window again.  It was not very long after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast.  Her father was with him, and between them sat a woman.  She recognized the woman at once.  She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham.  “They have got Miss Bell,” she thought; “mother must be awful sick.”  She knew that Miss Bell’s wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case.  She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he.  Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him.  She heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy after his horse was tied, and take out two cases.  She hated him while he did it.  She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come to her mother because of those cases.  She watched the doctor limp up the steps with positive malevolence.  “If he is such a smart doctor, why doesn’t he cure himself?” she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the sound of the door opening into her mother’s room.  A frightful sense of isolation came over her.  She realized that it was infinitely worse to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness.  She tried again to pray, then she stopped.  “It is no good praying,” she reflected, “God did not stop mother’s pain.  It was only stopped by that stuff I smelled out in the entry.”  She could not reason back of that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall.  It seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother’s room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet smell even through her closed door.  Then her father opened her door abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost of pain and death.

“The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can’t leave her,” he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still with that angry tone towards the unoffending child.  “Can you make coffee?”

“I don’t know how.”

“Good for nothing!” said her father, and shut the door with a subdued bang.