do, and you will have to work fast. First,
make grandfather comfortable in his room, and build up this fire. Then
heat up as much water as the big kettle will hold, and see that a
smaller one is scoured absolutely clean. Start some water heating in
that, too. Finally, undress Lou completely, and wrap her in a blanket.
Can you remember all that?"

"Yes, Donald ... yes, doctor."

Donald smiled, and added, "One thing more. Partly fill a pillow-case
with sand, or dirt, if it is possible to get any. Perhaps the ground in
the wood-house isn't frozen so hard but that you can get it."

She nodded wonderingly.

In a quarter of an hour her duties were completed and Miss Merriman and
Donald had appeared, clad in their spotless white garments of service.
Rose, likewise, was in her play uniform, which was now considerably too
small for her, and her appearance in it would have caused a smile if it
had not been more provocative of tears.

Six months earlier the doctor and nurse, assisted by others of the most
skilled and highly trained that the metropolis afforded, had prepared to
perform the same desperate service in humanity's cause, within the
perfectly appointed operating room of a modern city hospital. How
different was the setting now!

In the rude, but homey room of the mountain cabin, lighted only by
old-fashioned lamps and lanterns and the pulsating blaze of the fire in
the cavernous fireplace, whose colorful gleam touched with gold the
scoured copper of pot and kettle, the three workers, in the immaculate
garments of a city sickroom, bent intently over the naked form of the
nearly insensible child, to whose alabaster body the leaping flames
imparted a simulated glow of warm tones.

The general examination was brief, and made in silence. Then Donald drew
the covering over the little body as a sculptor might the cloth over his
statue, and straightened up with a look in his gray eyes that was new to
Rose.

He spoke in curt sentences. "Of course the case is far more desperate
than our last, Miss Merriman. It's the proverbial 'one chance in a
thousand.' On that single thread hangs the child's life."

Suddenly he startled Rose by giving a short, mirthless laugh, and,
turning away, he began to speak in an undertone, as though unconscious
of the presence of the other two, for, despite his previous calm, the
thought of what was in prospect had keyed up his nerves to a pitch where
they quivered like the E string of a violi