DR. EZRA LAWTON had come home an hour earlier from enacting the trying rôle of Stork’s Assistant. He had sunk to sleep wearily and embarked at once on a delightful dream of his unanimous election as Chairman of the Massachusetts State Medical Board.
All Aura, apparently, celebrated this dream election. For the three church bells were ringing loudly in honor of it. There were also a few thousand other bells which had been imported from somewhere for the occasion. The result was a continuous loud jangle which was as deafeningly annoying to the happy old doctor as it was gratifying.
Presently annoyance got the better of gratification and he awoke. But even though his beautiful dream had departed the multiple bell-ringing kept noisily on. And with a groan he realized the racket emanated from the telephone at his bedside.
“Well,” he snarled, vicious with dead sleepiness, as he lifted the receiver, “what the devil do you want?”
He listened for a second, then said in a far different voice:
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Gregg. I didn’t guess it was you. Nothing the matter, I hope?” he added, as though elderly spinsters were in the habit of calling him up at three in the morning when nothing was the matter.
Again, this time much longer, he listened. Then he ejaculated:
“Good Lord! Oh, good Lord!”
The genuine horror in his voice waked wide his slumbrous wife. By dint of thirty years as a country doctor’s spouse Mrs. Lawton had schooled herself to doze peacefully through the nocturnal telephone ringing and three A. M. smalltalk which fringed her busy husband’s career.
Mrs. Lawton sat bolt upright in bed. Her husband was listening once more. Through the dark his wife could hear the scratchedly buzzy tones of Miss Gregg, desiccated and attenuated by reason of the faulty connection. But, try as she would, she could catch no word. At last Lawton spoke again, the hint of horror still in his voice: