he answered the tap at her
door.

She frowned a little though at sight of Mrs. Hughes standing there
deferential but visibly excited. She had that look of trying not to
intrude her worthiness as she said: "Excuse me, Mrs. Williams, for
disturbing you, but there is something I thought you ought to know." In
answer to the not very cordial look of inquiry she went on, "It's about
Lily; she says she won't have a doctor, but--she needs one."

There was something in her manner, something excited and yet grim, that
Mrs. Williams did not understand. But then she did not much trouble
herself to understand Mrs. Hughes, she was always appearing to see some
hidden significance in things. "I'll go up and see her," she said.

After the visit she came down to telephone for her doctor. She saw that
the girl was really ill, and she had concluded from her strange manner
that she was feverish. Lily protested that she wanted to be let alone,
that she would be all right in a day or two; but she looked too ill for
those protestations to be respected.

She telephoned for her own doctor only to learn that he was out of town.
Upon calling another physician's house she was told that he had the grip
and could not go out. She then sat for some minutes in front of the
'phone before she looked up a number in the book and called Dr. Deane
Franklin. When she rose after doing that she felt as if her knees were
likely to give way. The thought of his coming into her house, coming
just when she had been living through old things, was unnerving. But she
was really worried about the girl and knew no one else to call whom she
could trust.

When he came she was grateful to him for his professional manner which
seemed to take no account of personal things, to have no personal
memory. "I'd like to see you when you come down, doctor," she said as
Mrs. Hughes was taking him to the maid's room on the third floor.

She was waiting for him at the door of her upstairs sitting-room. He
stepped in and then stood hesitatingly there. He too had a queer grim
look, she thought.

"And what is the trouble?" she asked.

He gave her a strange sideways glance and snapped shut a pocket of the
bag he carried. Then he said, brusquely: "It's a miscarriage."

She felt the blood surging into her face. She had stepped a little back
from him. "Why--I don't see how that's possible," she faltered.

He smiled a little and she had a feeling that he took a satisfaction in
saying