The girl was only partially conscious.  Ellen ran down the stairs and into Willy’s room.

“Get up,” she cried, shaking him.  “That girl’s killed herself.”

“Lily!”

“No, Edith.  Carbolic acid.”

Even then he remembered her mother.

“Don’t let her hear anything, It will kill her,” he said, and ran up the stairs.  Almost immediately he was down again, searching for alcohol; he found a small quantity and poured that down the swollen throat.  He roused Dan then, and sent him running madly for Doctor Smalley, with a warning to bring him past Mrs. Boyd’s door quietly, and to bring an intubation set with him in case her throat should close.  Then, on one of his innumerable journeys up and down the stairs he encountered Mrs. Boyd herself, in her nightgown, and terrified.

“What’s the matter, Willy?” she asked.  “Is it a fire?”

“Edith is sick.  I don’t want you to go up.  It may be contagious.  It’s her throat.”

And from that Mrs. Boyd deduced diphtheria; she sat on the stairs in her nightgown, a shaken helpless figure, asking countless questions of those that hurried past.  But they reassured her, and after a time she went downstairs and made a pot of coffee.  Ensconced with it in the lower hall, and milk bottle in hand, she waylaid them with it as they hurried up and down.

Upstairs the battle went on.  There were times when the paralyzed muscles almost stopped lifting the chest walls, when each breath was a new miracle.  Her throat was closing fast, too, and at eight o’clock came a brisk young surgeon, and with Willy Cameron’s assistance, an operation was performed.  After that, and for days, Edith breathed through a tube in her neck.

The fiction of diphtheria was kept up, and Mrs. Boyd, having a childlike faith in medical men, betrayed no anxiety after the first hour or two.  She saw nothing incongruous in Ellen going down through the house while she herself was kept out of that upper room where Edith lay, conscious now but sullen, disfigured, silent.  She was happy, too, to have her old domain hers again, while Ellen nursed; to make again her flavorless desserts, her mounds of rubberlike gelatine, her pies.  She brewed broths daily, and when Edith could swallow she sent up the results of hours of cooking which Ellen cooled, skimmed the crust of grease from the top, and heated again over the gas flame.

She never guessed the conspiracy against her.

Between Ellen and Edith there was no real liking.  Ellen did her duty, and more; got up at night; was gentle with rather heavy hands; bathed the girl and brushed and braided her long hair.  But there were hours during that simulated quarantine when a brooding silence held in the sick-room, and when Ellen, turning suddenly, would find Edith’s eyes on her, full of angry distrust.  At those times Ellen was glad that Edith could not speak.

For at the end of a few days Ellen knew, and Edith knew she knew.