Von Rosen gasped, then he looked pitifully at the poor little figure, and ran back to his study to the telephone.  To his great relief as he passed the window, he glanced out, and saw Doctor Sturtevant’s automobile making its way cautiously over the icy street.  Then for the first time he remembered that he had been due at that time about a matter of a sick parishioner.  He opened the front door hurriedly, and stated the case, and the two men carried the little unconscious creature upstairs.  Then Von Rosen came down, leaving the doctor and Martha with her.  He waited in the study, listening to the sounds overhead, waiting impatiently for the doctor’s return, which was not for half an hour or more.  In the meantime Martha came downstairs on some errand to the kitchen.  Von Rosen intercepted her.  “What does Doctor Sturtevant think?” he asked.

“Dunno, what he thinks,” replied Martha brusquely, pushing past him.

“Is she conscious yet?”

“Dunno, I ain’t got any time to talk,” said Martha, casting a flaming look at him over her shoulder as she entered the kitchen.

Von Rosen retreated to the study, where he was presently joined by the doctor.  “What is it?” asked Von Rosen with an emphasis, which rendered it so suspicious that he might have added:  “what the devil is it?” had it not been for his profession.

Sturtevant answered noiselessly, the motion of his lips conveying his meaning.  Then he said, shrugging himself into his fur coat, as he spoke, “I have to rush my motor to see a patient, whom I dare not leave another moment, then I will be back.”

Von Rosen’s great Persian cat had curled himself on the doctor’s fur coat, and now shaken off, sat with a languid dignity, his great yellow plume of a tail waving, and his eyes like topazes fixed intently upon Sturtevant.  At that moment a little cry was heard from the guest room, a cry between a moan and a scream, but unmistakably a note of suffering.  Sturtevant jammed his fur cap upon his head and pulled on his gloves.

“Don’t go,” pleaded Von Rosen in a sudden terror of helplessness.

“I must, but I’ll break the speed laws and be back before you know it.  That housekeeper of yours is as good as any trained nurse, and better.  She is as hard as nails, but she does her duty like a machine, and she has brains.  I will be back in a few minutes.”

Then Sturtevant was gone, and Von Rosen sat again before his study fire.  There was another little note of suffering from above.  Von Rosen shuddered, rose, and closed his door.  The Persian cat came and sat in front of him, and gazed at him with jewel-like eyes.  There was an expression of almost human anxiety and curiosity upon the animal’s face.  He came from a highly developed race; he and his forbears had always been with humans.  At times it seemed to Von Rosen as if the cat had a dumb knowledge of the most that he himself knew.  He reached down and patted the shapely golden head, but the cat withdrew, curled himself into a coil of perfect luxuriousness, with the firelight casting a warm, rosy glow upon his golden beauty, purred a little while, then sank into the mystery of animal sleep.