I looked around the room. How I wished some one would interrupt our talk. I could not listen to Mrs. Lester's prattle without answering her, and I did not wish to express any opinion on the subject.
As if answering my unspoken wish, Harry Underwood rose and came toward me.
"Were you looking for me?" he queried audaciously.
I had a sudden helpless, angry feeling that this man had been covertly watching me. Annoyed as I was, I was glad that he had interrupted us, for his presence would effectually stop Mrs. Lester's surmises concerning his wife.
"Indeed I was not looking for you," I replied 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.