CHAPTER III
AT JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL
The door of No. 77 Brown Street stood wide open. Any of the burglars for whom its mistress was always on the watch might have raided the tiny parlor or made off with father John's Sunday overcoat, hanging upon the hat-rack. Now also, while Dorothy hurried from room to room of the six which were all the house contained, the wind of a rising thunderstorm whistled through them and their open windows. Nor was there any reply to her anxious calls:
"Mother! Father! Anybody—somebody! Oh! where are you? What has happened? Mother—dearest mother Martha! Won't you answer?"
Certainly, this was a strange, a terrifying state of things. It was amazing that so careful a housewife as Martha Chester should leave her home in this unprotected condition, but it was quite natural for the well-trained girl, even in the midst of her alarm, to close the sashes against the rain that now came dashing in.
Then she hurried below and out into the little yard, or garden, that was her own special delight. Nobody there; but the pail and brush which Mrs. Chester had been using to clean her back kitchen were still upon its floor, the pail overturned and the water puddling its bricks, and the sight made Dorothy's heart sink lower yet.
Hurrying back to the street, a neighbor shielded her own head from the downpour and called from a next-door window:
"Something has happened to your father. A boy saw him picked up on the street and a policeman called a Johns Hopkins ambulance, that took him to the hospital. The boy knew him, told your mother, and she's hurried there. Don't worry. Probably it's nothing serious."
"Not serious! Oh! you don't know what you're saying! And to think I left him only such a little while! If that hateful old woman—I must go to him, too, I must, I must!"
With that Dorothy was retreating indoors, but again the neighbor's voice detained her: