d spiritedly. "But I
am glad you are here. Please talk to Mrs. Lester while I go to the
kitchen. I must give some directions to Katie."

"Of course that's a terribly hard task"--he began, smiling
mischievously at Mrs. Lester.

But he never finished his sentence. A loud, prolonged ringing of
the doorbell startled us all. It was the sort of ring one always
associates with an urgent summons of some sort.

"Oh! my baby. I know something's happened to the baby and they've come
to tell me."

Mrs. Lester's words rang high and shrill. They changed to a shriek as
Dicky opened the door and fell back startled.

For past him rushed a girl with a fear-distorted face holding in her
arms a baby that to my eyes looked as if it were dead.

But I had presence of mind enough to quiet Mrs. Lester's hysterical
fears.

"That is not your baby," I said sharply, grasping her by the arm. "It
is the child from across the hall!"

There is nothing in the world so pitiful to witness as the suffering
of a baby.

We all realized this as the maid held out to us the tiny infant, rigid
and blue as if it were already dead.

"Is the baby dead?" she gasped, her face convulsed with grief and
fear. "My madam is at the theatre, and the baby has been fretty for
two hours, and just a minute ago he stiffened out like this. Oh, dear!
Oh, dear!" she began to sob.

"Stop that!" Lillian Gale's voice rang out like a trumpet. "The baby
is not dead. It is in a convulsion. Give it to me and run back to your
apartment and bring me some warm blankets."

Of the six people at our little chafing dish supper, so suddenly
interrupted, she was the only one who knew what to do. I had been able
to, quiet Mrs. Lester's hysteria by telling her at once that the
baby was not her own, as she had so widely imagined, but was helpless
before the baby's danger.

Lillian's orders came thick and fast. She dominated the situation and
swept us along in the fight to save the baby's life until the doctor,
who had been summoned, arrived.

The physician was a tall, thin, young man, with a look of efficiency
about him. He looked at the baby carefully, laid his hand upon the
tiny forehead, then straightened himself.

"Is there any way in which the child's parents can be found?" Mr.
Underwood evidently had told him of the nature of the seizure and the
absence of the parents on the way up.

Lillian Gale's face grew pale under her rouge.

"There is danger, doctor?" she asked qui