Two physicians were hastily summoned, and when Mrs. Sutton arrived about noon, she met Phillis outside the door of the sick-chamber, carrying a lifeless infant in her arms, and weeping bitterly.

This was the end of the months of hopeful longing and glad anticipation which were Heaven’s messengers of healing and comfort to the sick and lonely heart.  The cunningly-fashioned robes were never to have a wearer, the clasping arms to remain still empty.  Oh wondrous mystery—­past finding out—­of the human soul!  Had the lungs once heaved with breath, the heart given one throb; the eyes caught one beam of Heaven’s light ere they were sealed fast in eternal darkness, she, who travailed with the infant through the inexpressible agony of birth, would have been written a mother among women; have had the right accorded her, without the cavil of formalist or the disputations of science, to claim the precious thing as her own still—­a living baby-spirit that had fluttered back to the bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world.  As it was, custom ordained that there should be no mourning for what had never really been.  Anguish, hope, and the patient love at which we do not scoff when the mother-bird broods over the eggs that may never hatch—­these were to be no more named or remembered.  In silence and without sympathy she must endure her disappointment.  The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest recompense—­would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone which should be lettered—­“Born Dead.”

All this and much more Mabel was to learn with the return of health and reason, but she lay now, like one who had passed for herself the narrow sea that separates the Now from the Hereafter; her features chiselled into the unmoving outlines of a waxen image, only a feeble flutter of breath and pulse telling that this was lethargy, not death.  They watched her all night, Mrs. Sutton on one side and Phillis on the other, the family physician stealing in with slippered tread from hour to hour, to note with his sensitive touch if the few poor drops of vital blood yet trickled from veins to heart, always with the same directions, “Give her the stimulant while she can swallow it.  It is the only hope of saving her.”

Armed with this, the two devoted women fought the Destroyer, praying inaudibly, while they wrought, for the life of the child they had reared to her sorrowful womanhood.

“He’s asleep, and so is she!” whispered Phillis, once, pointing alternately to the adjoining room where Herbert Dorrance awaited the issue of this critical stage of his wife’s illness, and to Mrs. Aylett’s chamber across the hall.  “The Lord forgive ’em both!  It won’t be they two that will shed many tears if so be she doesn’t see the light of another day—­the murdered lamb!  They tormented the life out of her.  I passed by her room last night before bed-time, and heard her a-sobbin’ and talkin’ to herself, and walkin’ up and down the floor, and they a-bangin’ away on the pyano down in the parlor!”