Julia turned to the little white-capped, white-coated figure.  Anna had chewed a bonnet string to damp limpness; now she was saying “Da!” in an alluring and provocative tone to a lady praying nearby.  The lady regarded her with an unmoved eye, however, and Julia gathered her small daughter in her arms and went down to the motor car.

At her mother’s door she dismissed Chadwick for an hour or two of warmth and shelter, and, sighing, went into the unaired dark hallway that smelled to-day of wet woollens and of a smoky kerosene wick, and retained as well its old faint odour of carbolic acid.

CHAPTER VI

Julia found the family as usual in the kitchen, and the kitchen as usual dirty and close.  Her old grandmother, a little bent figure in a loose calico wrapper, was rocking in a chair by the stove.  Julia’s mother was helpless in a great wheeled chair, with blankets and pillows carelessly disposed about her, and her eager eyes bright in a face chiselled by pain.  Sitting at the table was a heavy, sad-faced woman, with several front teeth missing, in whom Julia recognized her aunt, Mrs. Torney.  A girl of thirteen, with her somewhat colourless hair in untidy braids, and a flannel bandage high about her throat, came downstairs at the sound of Julia’s entrance.  This was Regina Torney.

“Well, it’s Julia!” Mrs. Cox said.  “And the darlin’ sweetie—­you oughtn’t to bring her out such weather, Julie!  How’s them little hands?”

She took the baby, and Julia kissed her mother and aunt, expecting to draw from the former the usual long complaints when she said: 

“How are you, dear?  How does the chair go?”

But Mrs. Page surprised her by some new quality in her look and tone, something poignantly touching and admirable.  She was a thin little shadow of her former self now, the skin drawn tight and shining over her cheek bones, her almost useless hands resting on a pillow in her lap.  She wore a soiled dark wrapper, her dark hair, still without a touch of gray, was in disorder, and her blankets and pillows were not clean.  She smiled at her daughter.

“I declare, Ju, you do seem to bring the good fresh air in with you whenever you come!  Don’t her cheeks look pretty, Regina?  Why, I’m just about the same, Ju.  To-day’s a real bad day, on account of the rain, but I had a good night.”

“She’s had an awful week, Julia.  She don’t seem to get no better,” Mrs. Torney said heavily.  “I was just saying that it almost seems like she isn’t going to get well; it just seems like it had got hold of her!”

Julia sat down next to her mother, and laid her own warm young hand over the hand on the pillow.

“What does the doctor say?” she asked, looking from one discouraging face to another.

“Oh, I don’t know!” Mrs. Page said, sighing, and old Mrs. Cox cackled out a shrill “Doctors don’t know nothing, anyway!”