"He's going to be ill. Telephone for the doctor to come right away. And you girls get his bed ready. No, you'd better put him in my room—it gets the sunlight. And you boys fill the ice-cap—and the hot-water bag and—hurry! Hurry!"
The specters vanished. She was alone with her lover. She was drying his forehead with her best lace handkerchief and murmuring:
"John honey, what's the matter! Why, honey—why didn't you tell me?"
Then a tall gentleman or two returned and one of them said:
"Better let us get him off the floor, Mère."
And the big sons of the frail little man picked him up and carried him into the room and pulled off his elastic congress gaiters, and his coat and vest, and his detached cuffs, and his permanently tied tie, and his ridiculous collar.
Then Mère put them out, and when the doctor arrived Pop was in bed in his best nightshirt.
The doctor made his way up through the little mob of terrified children. He found Mrs. Grout vastly agitated and much ashamed of herself. She did not wish to look sentimental. She had reached the Indian-summer modesty of old married couples.
The doctor went through the usual ritual of pulse-feeling and tongue-examining and question-asking, while Pop lay inert, with a little thermometer protruding from his mouth like a most inappropriate cigarette.
The doctor was uncertain yet whether it were one of the big fevers or pneumonia or just a bilious attack. Blood-tests would show; and he scraped the lobe of the ear of the unresisting, indifferent old man, and took a drop of thin pink fluid on a bit of glass. The doctor tried to reassure the panicky family, but his voice was low and important.