ss of his eyelids
more pronounced than ever as he faced Stott in the pale October dawn. He
clutched at his beard with a nervous, combing movement, as he shook his
head decidedly in answer to the question put to him.

"If it's not dead, now, 'twill be in very few hours," he said.

Stott was shaken by the feeble passion of a man who has spent many weary
hours of suspense. His anger thrilled out in a feeble stream of
hackneyed profanities.

O'Connell looked down on him with contempt. At sunrise, after a
sleepless night, a man is a creature of unrealised emotions.

"Damn it, control yourself, man!" growled O'Connell, himself
uncontrolled, "your wife'll pull through with care, though she'll never
have another child." O'Connell did not understand; he was an Irishman,
and no cricketer; he had been called in because he had a reputation for
his skill in obstetrics.

Stott stared at him fiercely. The two men seemed as if about to grapple
desperately for life in the windy, grey twilight.

O'Connell recovered his self-control first, and began again to claw
nervously at his beard. "Don't be a fool," he said, "it's only what you
could expect. Her first child, and her a woman of near fifty." He
returned to the upstairs room; Stott seized his cap and went out into
the chill world of sunrise.

"She'll do, if there are no complications," said O'Connell to the
nurse, as he bent over the still, exhausted figure of Mrs. Stott. "She's
a wonderful woman to have delivered such a child alive."

The nurse shivered, and avoiding any glance at the huddle that lay on an
improvised sofa-bed, she said: "It can't live, can it?"

O'Connell, still intent on his first patient, shook his head. "Never
cried after delivery," he muttered--"the worst sign." He was silent for
a moment and then he added: "But, to be sure, it's a freak of some
kind." His scientific curiosity led him to make a further investigation.
He left the bed and began to examine the huddle on the sofa-couch.
Victor Stott owed his life, in the first instance, to this scientific
curiosity of O'Connell's.

The nurse, a capable, but sentimental woman, turned to the window and
looked out at the watery trickle of feeble sunlight that now illumined
the wilderness of Stott's garden.

"Nurse!" The imperative call startled her; she turned nervously.

"Yes, doctor?" she said, making no movement towards him.

"Come here!" O'Connell was kneeling by the sofa. "There seems to be
complete