She would not leave him or cease to do what she could in every humble way. She chafed his hands and bathed his forehead;—she helped to carry him to the clubhouse; and, when the hospital ambulance came, she went in it to the hospital with him. She stood in the corridor outside the door of the room to which they carried him there, and waited while a surgeon examined him. Indeed, she waited, weeping.
She knew the surgeon, and when he came out of the room she rushed to him. “Doctor Waite, tell me! Don’t spare me!”
“He’s got a concussion. It’s no joke, but anyhow it isn’t a fracture. Funny about nobody knowing who he is;—I’m sure I’ve met him, or else he reminds me of somebody, I can’t think who.”
“Doctor, he isn’t—he isn’t going to——”
The surgeon looked upon her reassuringly. “No. We’ll pull him through. You quit thinking about him and go home and get your dinner and then go to bed and go to sleep.”
“I couldn’t,” Lily said, choking. “I couldn’t do any of those things.”
He laughed sympathetically. “Then I guess I’ll have to call up your mother and tell her to come and make you.”
But when not only her mother but her father, too, arrived in hurried response to the telephone, they could not get the tearful Lily to leave the hospital; and they remained with her, engaging in intermittent argument, until midnight. At that time Doctor Waite informed them that the unknown patient was in a torpid but not critical condition; he had mumbled a few words to the effect that he wanted to be let alone.
“And as that’s just what we’re doing with him,” the surgeon said to Lily rather sharply, “and as you can’t do any possible good to anybody in the world by staying here, I suggest that you take his advice, too, and obey your father and mother.”
Not until then would the suffering girl allow them to lead her away; but so far as sleep was concerned, she might as well have stayed at the hospital. So might her father and mother, almost; for she was at their door in her nightdress three times—three separated times, the last being at four o’clock in the morning. “Papa, do you think he’ll die?”