"Why didn't you call me before?"
"You were better asleep. You couldn't have done anything."
"Is—is the boy better?"
He shook his head, and put his hand to his throat as though his collar irked him.
"Not—dead? Oh, Bryan!"
"S—s-h! Just going. Come in now. I want you to see him first."
The house was quite new, full of quaint projecting windows planned to trap the sun, with a tiled roof that dipped and rose in unexpected places. A house of nooks and corners—built for light and air, and the new religion of open window and running water over porcelain baths, in which one feels death to be almost as incongruous as dust. Half the hall door was of glass, in bubbly panes like the bottom of a bottle. He held it open for her, and, bidding her follow, crossed the tiled hall parlor to a white-railed and velvet-carpeted staircase. A red-eyed maid-servant, carrying an enamelled pail and with a mass of soiled linen over one arm, stood aside to let them pass. At the head of the staircase was a square landing, lit by an octagonal turret skylight. A great many doors opened off it. Bryan turned the handle of one.
"In here!" he said.
The room was large and gaily papered. In the centre was a brass-railed cot. Its brass-railed sides had been lifted off and stood, behind it, against the wall. All around the little bed, upon tables and even chairs, were strange utensils, meaningless to the girl, some in glass, others in shining white metal with tubes that coiled and trailed, and linen, linen, everywhere that sheet or towel could be hung. The room was as full of strange scents as of strange shapes, but that of rubber overpowered all the rest, and was to be, for all time, the smell that could most vividly recall the scene to the girl's memory. The blinds were up, but no one had remembered to switch off the lights. Into one corner of the room a pile of toys had been hastily swept; prominent among them a great elephant brandished four lumpy wheeled legs in the air.
Upon the bed a little lad of five or six was lying, covered with clothes to his waist. Even now, with his poor little face lead-color, and all the spun silk of his hair damped down on his forehead, he was beautiful: with the hue of health on his cheek the face must have been that of an angel. His fringed eyelids were closed, and had dark shadows under them; his pinched nose was pitifully like Lumsden's. He seemed to be very tired, and very glad that all these clever people had given up exercising their skill upon him. For no one was doing anything now. One man, in shirt sleeves, held his limp wrist in a great hairy paw, and kept his eyes upon his watch; the other stood at his colleague's shoulder with his hands behind his back, intent upon the shrunken little face.