K

"She has felt the heat, of course. The summer--I often think--"

"Her lips are blue!"

"It's probably nothing serious."

"She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her."

She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something

of terror in her face.

Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.

"I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be

caring for other people, when my own mother--"

She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he

made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she

looked up.

"I'm much braver than this in the hospital. But when it's one's own!"

K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the

little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson,

not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the

dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood--back even to Joe.

But, with Anna's precarious health and Harriet's increasing engrossment in

her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her

training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it

had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not

worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her

suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.

Sidney sent Katie to ask Dr. Ed to come over after dinner. With the sunset

Anna seemed better. She insisted on coming downstairs, and even sat with

them on the balcony until the stars came out, talking of Christine's

trousseau, and, rather fretfully, of what she would do without the parlors.

"You shall have your own boudoir upstairs," said Sidney valiantly. "Katie

can carry your tray up there. We are going to make the sewing-room into

your private sitting-room, and I shall nail the machine-top down."

This pleased her. When K. insisted on carrying her upstairs, she went in a

flutter.

"He is so strong, Sidney!" she said, when he had placed her on her bed.

"How can a clerk, bending over a ledger, be so muscular? When I have

callers, will it be all right for Katie to show them upstairs?"

She dropped asleep before the doctor came; and when, at something after

eight, the door of the Wilson house slammed and a figure crossed the

street, it was not Ed at all, but the surgeon.