She
dressed herself quickly, then she wrote a little note in which she said:

I am uneasy about Mrs. Martin's child, and have gone down there.
Back to breakfast. PHILLIDA.

This she pinned to Agatha's stocking, so that it would certainly be
seen. Then she threw an old gray shawl over her hat, drawing it about
her head, in order to look as much as possible like a tenement-house
dweller running an early morning errand, hoping thus to escape the
curiosity that a well-dressed lady might encounter if seen on the street
at so early an hour. The storm and the clouds had gone, but the air was
moist from the recent rain. When she sallied forth no dawn was
perceptible, though the street lamps were most of them already out.
Just as the sky above Greenpoint began to glow and the reeking streets
took on a little gray, Phillida entered the stairway up which she
stumbled in black darkness to the Martin apartment.

The Martins were already up, and breakfast was cooking on the stove.

"Is that you, Miss Callender?" said Mrs. Martin. "I didn't expect you at
this hour. How did you get here alone?"

"Oh, well enough," said Phillida. "But how is little Tommy?"

"I'm afraid he is worse. I was just trying to persuade Mr. Martin to go
for you."

"I came to give up the case," said Phillida, hurriedly, "and to beg you
to get a doctor. I have done with faith-cures. I've lost my faith in
them entirely, and I'm afraid from what Mr. Martin told me last night
that this is diphtheria."

"I hope not," said Mrs. Martin, in renewed alarm.

Mr. Martin, who was shaving in his shirt-sleeves near the window, only
turned about when he got the lather off his face to say: "Good-morning,
Miss Callender. How's things with you?"

Phillida returned this with the slightest good-morning. She was out of
patience with Mr. Martin, and she was revolving a plan for discovering
whether Tommy's distemper were diphtheria or not. During her long
midnight meditations she had gone over every word of Dr. Beswick's about
bacteria and bacilli. She remembered his statement that the _micrococcus
diphtheriticus_ was to be found in the light-colored patches visible in
the throat of a diphtheria patient. At what stage these were developed
she did not know, but during her hours of waiting for morning she had
imagined herself looking down little Tommy's throat. She now asked for a
spoon, and, having roused Tommy from a kind of stupor, she inserted the
handle as she h