er voice under control,
and thought, with a certain pride, that she was succeeding. She ran
up-stairs again. The voice had begun again, but it seemed thicker now.
She got into her clothes, shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking
very clearly, as she always did in a crisis. She put clean towels in
the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got a glass of water,
straightened the covers, put away the clothes that the tired woman
had left about the room. Doctor Hertz came. He went through the usual
preliminaries, listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last.

"Fresh air," he said. "Cold air. All the windows open." They rigged up
a device of screens and sheets to protect the bed from the drafts. Fanny
obeyed orders silently, like a soldier. But her eyes went from the face
on the pillow to that of the man bent over the bed. Something vague,
cold, clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart. It was
like an icy hand, squeezing there. There had suddenly sprung up that
indefinable atmosphere of the sick-room--a sick-room in which a fight is
being waged. Bottles on the table, glasses, a spoon, a paper shade over
the electric light globe.

"What is it?" said Fanny, at last. "Grip?--grip?"

Doctor Hertz hesitated a moment. "Pneumonia."

Fanny's hands grasped the footboard tightly. "Do you think we'd better
have a nurse?"

"Yes."

The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously. And the morning
came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her work, a little more
quietly than usual. And yesterday seemed far away. It was afternoon; it
was twilight. Doctor Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he
brought another doctor with him--Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was not talking
now. But she was breathing. It filled the room, that breathing; it
filled the house. Fanny took her mother's hand, that hand with the
work-hardened palm and the broken nails. It was very cold. She looked
down at it. The nails were blue. She began to rub it. She looked up into
the faces of the two men. She picked up the other hand--snatched at it.
"Look here!" she said. "Look here!" And then she stood up. The vague,
clammy thing that had been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed. And
at that something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her. She
came around to the foot of the bed, and gripped it with her two hands.
Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were bright and staring. She
looked very much like her mother, just then