en the
doctor was there, he said that she could not last through the day; I had
sent for him hurriedly, for her body had swollen up rapidly, and I did
not know what had happened; the pleura of one lung had become perforated,
and the air escaping into the cavity of the chest had caused the
swelling; while he was there, one of the fits of coughing came on, and it
seemed as though it would be the last; the doctor took a small bottle of
chloroform out of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief, held
it near the child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle.
"It can't do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the
suffering." He went away, saying that he would return in the afternoon,
but he feared he would never see the child alive again. One of the
kindest friends I had in my married life was that same doctor, Mr.
Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was clever, and, like so
many of his noble, profession, he had the merits of discretion and of
silence.

That chance thought of his about the chloroform, verily, I believe, saved
the child's life. Whenever one of the convulsive fits was coming on I
used it, and so not only prevented to a great extent the violence of the
attacks, but also the profound exhaustion that followed them, when of
breath at the top of the throat showing that she still lived. At last,
though more than once we had thought her dead, a change took place for
the better, and the child began slowly to mend. For years, however, that
struggle for life left its traces on her, not only in serious
lung-delicacy but also in a form of epileptic fits. In her play she would
suddenly stop, and become fixed for about a minute, and then go on again
as though nothing had occurred. On her mother a more permanent trace was
left.

Not unnaturally, when the child was out of danger, I collapsed from sheer
exhaustion, and I lay in bed for a week. But an important change of mind
dated from those silent weeks with a dying child on my knees. There had
grown up in my mind a feeling of angry resentment against the God who had
been for weeks, as I thought, torturing my helpless baby. For some months
a stubborn antagonism to the Providence who ordained the sufferings of
life had been steadily increasing in me, and this sullen challenge, "Is
God good?" found voice in my heart during those silent nights and days.
My mother's sufferings, and much personal unhappiness, had been,
intensifying the f