Then in a somewhat hesitating and embarrassed manner she cleaned up some water drops from the table, and cast scrutinizing glances at the Judge from under her eyelids.
He did not see her. His mind was wandering. His body was in the room, but his thoughts were at the hospital with his cruelly injured grandson.
Mrs. Blodgett waved Higby from the room. Then, soberly depositing the basket on a corner of the hearth rug, she too slipped out.
The princess lay quietly in her basket, just keeping one eye on the Judge. She was a discreet young pigeon, but then all pigeons are discreet. They are hatched with serious dispositions. Play rarely enters into their thoughts. They want to work, to eat, and not to be taken from their homes, for, next to cats, pigeons love their own locality.
The Judge never looked at the princess, and after standing up to clean and arrange her feathers, the last thing a well bred pigeon does at night, she went to sleep.
The poor Judge sank into an easy-chair. Hour after hour he sat buried there, buried in sorrow. At midnight he got up and went to the telephone on a desk by the window.
“Give me the City Hospital,” he said, and then he went on: “Judge Sancroft is speaking. How is my grandson?”
He groaned when he received the message: “Boy remains the same—condition unchanged.” Then he went back to his easy-chair.
At intervals all through the night he went from his chair to the telephone, and back again.
His face would light up when he approached the desk. Then as the too familiar reply came back it would fall, his head would sink on his breast, his shoulders would droop, and with the step of an old and weary man he would turn away.