He was almost too stunned at first to realise that there was anything serious the matter; but it gradually dawned upon him that she ought not to be allowed to lie there as she was without calling in some assistance, and so, not pausing to put on his coat, he ran out of the bedroom on to the landing, and stood there in his shirt sleeves, in terrified and breathless anxiety.
“Thompkins!” he cried excitedly. “Thompkins!”
“Hallo!” answered a voice from the bottom of the stairs, a voice of calm and unruffled serenity.
“For God’s sake run for the doctor,” St. John called back.
There was silence for a few seconds; then the street door was opened and banged to again, and St. John returned to the room to watch by his wife and wait.
Chapter Eighteen.
It was not many weeks after her sudden and unusual attack of unconsciousness that Jill presented her husband with a little son. The small stranger appeared upon the scene rather too soon, and was delicate and puny in consequence, and a great source of anxiety to its parents. Jill, herself, was very ill for a long while after its birth, so that St. John had a trying and expensive time of it, the only beneficial result being that every minor worry was forgotten in the all absorbing one of his wife’s health.
After the child’s birth he wrote a brief note to his father acquainting him with the news. He considered it his duty to do so, though he neither expected nor hoped for any reply to the letter; and he was not disappointed; Mr St. John, Senior, might never have received it for all the sign he made, and Jill, being ill and low-spirited at the time, cried with annoyance to think that her husband should have written to him at all.