They were torturing him; the child’s cry of utter agony reached her where she sat.  It came to her, in a flash, that Warren had said there might be no merciful chloroform.  Cold water broke out on her forehead, she covered her ears with her hands, her breath coming wild and deep.  Derry!

“Oh, no—­Daddy!  Oh, no, Daddy!  Oh, Mother—­Mother—!”

“Oh, my God! this is not right,” Rachael said half aloud.  “Oh, take him, take him, but don’t let him suffer so!”

She was writhing as if the suffering were her own.  For perhaps five horrible moments the house rang, then there was sudden silence.

“Now he is dead,” Rachael said in the same quiet, half-audible tone.  “I am glad.  He will never know what pain is again.  Five perfect little years, with never one instant that was not sweet and good.  Gerald Fairfax Gregory—­five years old.  One sees it in the papers almost every day.  But who thinks what it means?  Just the mother, who remembers the first cry, and the little crumpled flannel wrappers, and the little hand crawling up her breast.  He walked so much sooner than Jim did, but of course he was lighter.  And how he would throw things out of windows—­the camera that hit the postman!  Oh, my God!”

For the anguished screaming had recommenced, and the child wanted his mother.

Rachael bore it for endless, agonizing minutes.  Presently Alice, white-faced, was kneeling on the step below her, and their wet hands were clasped.

“Dearest, why do you sit here!”

“Oh, Alice, could I get Warren, do you think?  They mustn’t—­it’s too cruel!  He’s only a baby, he doesn’t understand!  Better a thousand times to let him go—­tell them so!  Get George—­tell him I say so!”

“Rachael, it’s terrible,” said Alice, who was crying hard, “b-b-but they must think there is a chance, dear.  We couldn’t interrupt them now.  He would see you—­there, he’s quiet again.  That may be all!”

But it was not the end for many hours.  The women on the stairs, and the sobbing maids in the diningroom, hoped and despaired, and grew faint and sick themselves as the merciless work went on.  Once George came out of the room for a few minutes, with a face flaked with white, and his surgeon’s gown crumpled, wet with water and stained here and there a terrible red.  He did not speak to either woman, and in answer to Alice’s breath of interrogation merely shook his head.

At four o’clock Warren himself came to the door.  Rachael sprang to her feet, was close to him in a second.  The sight of him, his gown, his hands, his dreadful face, turned Alice faint, but Rachael’s voice was steady.

“What is it?”

“We are nearly done.  Nearly done,” Warren said.  “I can’t tell yet--nobody can.  But I must finish it.  Do you think you could—­he keeps asking for you.  I am sorry to ask you—­”

“Hold him?” Rachael’s voice of agony said.  “Yes, I could do that.  I—­I have been wanting to!”