“Oh!” gasped Gloria. “You poor—poor creature!”
Gasping for breath and uttering choking gasps the woman lay there, and even in her agony she seemed to be trying to quiet her panic-stricken little ones. Now she fastened her eyes upon the stranger and tossed her head from side to side, struggling to say something, but only biting back the attempt with colorless lips.
“What is it?” demanded Gloria, from Ellen.
“The—medicine,” gasped the frightened girl. “He told her not to take any more, but—she couldn’t stand the pain! Oh, don’t let her die until father comes!”
“Away—workin’. He won’t be home till Saturday night!”
As if the hand of death would wait for time, this overwrought girl could think of nothing but the terror of her mother dying with the father not there to know. Her helplessness was pitiful. How they depended upon that father!
“Was the medicine poison?” demanded Gloria watching with terror the twitching of the sick woman’s face.
“Two doses was. And the doctor warned her—”
“Never mind that,” ordered Gloria, “and stop crying. We must do something. What do you give if she is—weak?”
“Coffee,” replied Marty promptly. “It’s on the stove.”
Following Gloria’s lead Ellen got to her feet, lay the baby in its cradle in spite of violent protests, and although the crying still kept up, its intensity was quickly lessened by something stuck in the infant’s mouth.
In a few moments Gloria had the coffee hot and was trying to make the woman drink some of it.
“Here, please,” she begged, with an arm under the frail shoulders, “drink a few mouthfuls—”
How she held the woman up Gloria did not stop to consider. She simply realized that something must be done promptly, and reasoned that the medicine must have been of a sort to relieve pain, therefore a sedative. For this, Gloria knew, coffee might act as a reacting stimulant.
Quite as if she had performed a miracle, the children gathered around the bed, wide eyed and wondering. Ellen stared so that her eyes fairly bulged out in glaring balls. She had been the most terrified, probably having a keener understanding of the fate that hung over them, and perhaps, feeling somewhat responsible for her mother’s accident.
“I put it on the chair,” she protested, “and ma was asleep. When she woke—” She clenched her hands and still stared at the figure on the bed as if trying to realize that it breathed and was not dead.