“She was at St. John’s, only a few blocks from my apartment, and I went to see her every morning before luncheon and every late afternoon. She seemed more cheerful in the hospital, and the doctors were hopeful that a few weeks of it would make a new woman of her.
“One day, about a week after Lily’s poor little baby had come and gone, the old doctor in whom Cecily specially trusted, the man who had her in charge, walked down the hospital steps and into the park with me, and we had a long talk, sitting on a park bench. He told me then—and you may imagine what I felt when I heard it!—that there was every probability that young Mrs. Roger Fleming was about to become a mother.
“For a while I was stupefied. I asked him to have a consultation. He said no, that was not necessary now, and might distress her. She had, he gathered from hints to the nurse,—she had a certain curious dislike for the idea of motherhood.
“‘Dislike, Doctor!’ I said. ‘I believe it would kill her, if she did not kill herself!’
“And I tried to give him some idea of her character, what a strange half child, half mystic she was. He listened to me very gravely. It was important, he said, not to shock her.
“That was the first time I ever heard of shock as an actual danger to a sick person. I remember he explained it carefully. Cecily did not have the vitality of a humming-bird, he said. If we could get hold of the husband——
“I had to go on. I explained that her husband was much older, was, in fact, twenty-three or -four years older, and that—in the true sense—she did not love him. And I said that I was sure that if she were to have a baby, her love for it would come with the child.
“I said all the usual things, and he agreed with me. He told me the circumstance of the false diagnosis was unusual, but it had happened before—happened in his practice before. There was of course a possibility now that he was mistaken, that it was what the other doctors had always supposed. And there was every probability that the baby would not live, under the curious circumstances. But it seemed cruel not to give young Mrs. Fleming this hope.
“‘It would be no hope to her!’ I said. ‘Whatever the child, if it lived, might come to mean to her, this prospect would make her absolutely ill.’
“We agreed that for a while, therefore, nothing must be said about it. But it was only ten days later that they took Cecily up to the surgery, and her baby, two months too soon, was born. She was dying, they thought that night, and there seemed every probability that the baby would die, too. A nice little nurse there told me that she wanted to give the child lay-baptism, and I made no objection. She asked what name, and I said, ‘Mary.’ It was the first name I thought of. ‘I’ll name her that and my name,’ she said. ‘I’ll call her Mary Gabrielle!’”