she saw. He was out on the light wooden balcony before
the west window--with the child, grasped by its middle, in both hands.
Then the great arms straightened. He was holding the boy out in the
blinding sunshine--out in the empty air, above a drop of thirty feet
sheer to the gravel drive below. She saw this red as though bathed with
blood. The Italian woman had cast herself prone on the ground--she tore
at her hair in a sort of fit. Sophy stood congealed. Even her eyes
seemed stiffening. Her breath stopped ... her heart.... She saw the boy
begin to writhe--then her heart writhed in her; but she stood fast. Was
the boy screaming? Deafness seemed to have smitten her. She could see
the piteous round of the little mouth--wide open--but no sound reached
her.

Over his shoulder the madman flung with a laugh:

"Perhaps _now_ you'll do as I tell you."

She heard a "Yes" go from her. It seemed like some faint, winged thing
fluttering from her mouth towards him. She was afraid it would not reach
him. She sent another--another. "Yes.... Yes...."

"You swear it?"

"Yes...."

"Never to see that little cur again?"

"Yes----"

"Then here's 'the pledge of love,'" he chuckled. He strode back and
dropped the boy into her arms.

But the next instant his face sobered into a scared look. The child was
in spasms. Like a little fish upon a bank, he jerked and twitched on his
mother's breast.

"I say," muttered the frightened man; "I've gone it a bit too thick ...
eh?"

She was gazing with blind eyes at her boy. All her face looked blind.
She had sunk down on the floor with him. There was a dreadful, dulled,
yet crazed, look in the very way she held the jerking body. She kept
whispering: "A doctor!... A doctor!... A doctor!..." It was as if she
were choking and this hoarse word "doctor" were what she coughed up to
keep from strangling. Neither she nor Chesney noticed the appalled group
that had gathered at the nursery door, drawn there by Rosa's
scream--Luigi, Maria, Tilda, the gardener's boy, Tibaldo. Rosa, now
sitting up on the tiled floor, muttered and sobbed senselessly.

But when Sophy began her monotonous croak of, "Doctor!... Doctor!..."
this group vanished as by magic--all save Tilda, who came and crouched
down by her mistress, helping her hold the struggling child. And all at
once, Chesney, too, dashed from the room.

When he reached the terrace, he saw Luigi, like a little black hare,
scudding towards the _banchett