"Mother Cary!" he demanded almost before Rosamund had opened the door. "Mother Cary! Where is she?"
Rosamund drew back, as if repelled from the dripping figure. Unconsciously she had, expected something else.
"Mother Cary is not here," she said, coldly.
"Not here?" he cried. Then, like a man who finds himself suddenly stopped, repeating, "Not here? To-night?"
"She went to her daughter's, before the storm broke. The baby is sick."
"Then Father Cary—I must have someone!"
"He is with her," said Rosamund, and made as though she would close the door, although, if truth be told, no power on earth would have made her do so. But Ogilvie stepped, still dripping, across the threshold, while she stood before him in her dress of thin blue, silhouetted against the lamp-light.
For a moment they faced each other, again, as earlier on that day, their natures and all the difference in their training and traditions ranged in opposing forces.
The appeal of her beauty, the memory of their hours together, swept over him like the breath of a dream; but the doctor in him was uppermost.
"It's the Allen woman," he said. "That boy, six years old, came all the way to my house to tell me. Jim Allen is in the woods, and there's no telling how long she's been that way. The baby is starving; and if I don't operate now she will die, and the baby, too."