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By Root 5752 0

shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what seemed to Elinor an eternity of hours. Like the scream of a rabbit in a trap. But a thousand times worse; for it was a child that screamed, not an animal; her child, trapped and in agony. She felt as though she too were trapped. Trapped by her own utter helplessness to alleviate his pain. Trapped by that obscure sense of guilt, that irrational belief (but haunting in spite of its irrationality), that ever more closely pressing and suffocating conviction that it was all, in some inscrutable fashion, her fault, a punishment, malevolently vicarious, for her offence. Caged within her own snare, but outside his, she sat there holding the small hand as it were between invisible bars, unable to come to his aid, waiting through the child’s quickbreathed and feverish silence for the recurrence of that dreadful cry, for yet another sight of that suddenly distorted face, that shuddering little body racked by a pain which was somehow of her own inflicting.

The doctor came at last with his opiates.

Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a stomach-ache. It was absurd. S

he met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and with such darkcircled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.

‘But you’re the one who’s ill,’ he said anxiously ‘What is it?’

She did not answer for a moment, but stood holding him, her face hidden on his shoulder, pressing herself against him. ‘Dr. Crowther says it’s meningitis,’ she whispered at last.

At halfpast five arrived the nurse for whom Mrs. Bidlake had telegraphed in the morning. The evening papers came by the same train; the chauffeur returned with a selection of them. On the front page was the announcement of the discovery, in -his own motor car, of Everard Webley’s body. It was to old John Bidlake, dozing listlessly in the library, that the papers were first brought. He read and was so excited by the news of another’s death that he entirely forgot all his preoccupations with his own. Rejuvenated, he sprang to his feet and ran, waving the paper, into the hall. ‘Philip!’ he shouted in the strong resonant voice that had not been his for weeks past. ‘Philip! Come here at once!’

Philip, who had just come out of the sickroom and was standing in the corridor, talking to Mrs. Bidlake, hurried down to see what was the matter. John Bidlake held out the paper with an expression almost of triumph on his face. ‘Read that,’ he commanded importantly.

When Elinor was told the news, she almost fainted.

‘I believe he’s better this morning, Dr. Crowther.’

Dr. Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight. He was a small man, brisk and almost too neatly dressed. ‘Quieter, eh? Sleeps?’ he enquired telegraphically. His conversation had been reduced to bed-rock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and nothing more. No energy was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words. Dr. Crowther spoke as Ford cars are made. Elinor disliked him intensely, but believed in him for just those qualities of perky efficiency and selfconfidence which she detested.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said. ‘He’s sleeping.’

‘He would be,’ said Dr. Crowther, nodding, as though he had known everything in advance-which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.

Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. ‘Is it a good sign?’ she asked in a voice that implored a favourable answer.

Dr. Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well…’ he said non-committally and was silent. He had saved at least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of depression follows the initial phase of excitement.

The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor was thankful for that), but disquietingly