“You see!” answered Mary, pointing to the moist lips of the girl.
The nurse pushed her away between the cots, saw the vial with its cork out and moisture about the neck, and her white lips broke into a half smile, so cold, so deadly, that Mary Margaret shrunk back as if a snake were creeping across her feet.
Still the woman did not seem quite satisfied, but took up the spoon, out of which Mary Margaret had drank, and touched her tongue to the bowl.
“Oh!” she said, rather in a deep breath than with words, “oh! now watch, and I will go to bed a while. If she sleeps, let her!—if she wakes up, call me.”
“And if she is worse, where can I find the doctor?” asked Mary, gazing wistfully at her enemy through the lamp-light, and shuddering at the strange sensations that she fancied to be creeping over her. “The doctor, where is he?”
“Call me if you want any one. Bellevue doctors don’t come to the beck and call of their pauper patients.”
“But I must have a doctor!” persisted Mary.
“Must!” echoed the woman, turning deadly white.
“Oh!” and with a slow, cat-like movement she crept back to the bed, lingered over the pillow an instant and disappeared, carrying the vial of medicine with her.
Poor Mary Margaret scarcely saw it. Her eyes were growing so heavy, and an oppressive languor weighed down her limbs. She forgot every thing, even the fair young mother, who opened her eyes and asked so meekly for drink again. All that the poor woman hoped for now was power to get back to her own pauper cot and die close to her baby. She thought nothing of the strange nursling then, for all the feeling left unnumbed in her heart turned to her own offspring.