At the sound of the hoarse voice, Dr. Grafton hurried back into the room, followed by Dr. Curtis. And then began a fight with death that Barbara never forgot. Pushed aside as merely an onlooker, the girl watched, with a sort of curiosity, the man that she saw for the first time in her life. The father she had always known had vanished; in his place was the skilled physician, who seemed to have thought for the patient rather than the son. The two doctors worked like one machine,—fighting the fever back step by step, beating it, choking it, quenching it; pitting against it strength and science and skill. And when it finally succumbed, and David was snatched from the burning, a poor little wasted wraith of life, Barbara understood the worship that Dr. Grafton’s patients gave him.
“We’ve won out,” he said. “The fever’s left the boy. Now if we can only keep him alive to-night—”
The shadows of evening were heavy in the room as Miss Graves’s starchiness sounded along the hall. She went at once to the bedside, and laid her hand on the boy’s forehead. Then she looked quickly up at the doctor. In that glance Barbara read the whole story,—it was a question, now, of vitality.
Susan herself brought up the tray of supper to Barbara, who tried to eat it in order to seem appreciative. But the rolls and the creamed chicken were sent back untasted, and she could not even find words to reply to the unworded sympathy in Susan’s good-night. The old habit of gesture comes back in times of deepest emotion, and both girls understood, without need of words, Susan’s reassuring pat of the shoulder, and Barbara’s tight grasp of the hand.
“Go to bed, children,” said Dr. Grafton, as he came out of the sick-room to the hall where Barbara and Jack stood together. “We need absolute quiet and plenty of air for the boy. There’ll be no change for several hours, and you want all the sleep you can get.”
“I can’t sleep,” protested Jack.
“But you can rest, and you must do it,” answered his father. “We may need you both—later.”
“You’ll call us,” said Jack, “if—”