One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia’s heart swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. “Oh, ’Stashie! Stashie!” she called in a voice that brought the other clattering breathlessly up the stairs. “The baby! Look at the baby! And she won’t touch her bottle.”
The tragic change in the Irishwoman’s face as she looked at their darling, their anguished community of feeling—there was instantly a bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing differences between them. Lydia felt herself—as she rarely did—not alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. “’Stashie, you don’t—you don’t think she’s—sick?” She brought the word out with horrified difficulty.
’Stashie was running down the back stairs. “I’m ’phonin’ to th’ little ould doctor,” she called over her shoulder.
Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia’s terror, she had sunk into a stupor.
The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby’s bed with white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her temperature. “Just turn her so she’ll lie comfortably,” he told ’Stashie, “and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your mistress.”
In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to summon her strength. “Are you fit to be a mother?” he asked harshly.
“Wait a minute,” said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the balustrade. “Yes,” she answered.
“Ariadne’s very sick. I oughtn’t to have allowed you to wean her with hot weather coming on. You’d better wire Paul.”
“Yes,” she said, not blenching. “What else can I do?”
“’Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest drug store for me. I’ll go back to her now.”