The sun has poured into the window and gone on to other sick chambers.  The flaxseed and stramonium seem like reminders of the past stage of the trouble.  Richard Tarbelle, never before in a room where the tide of life was low, looks down on Davy.

“Mr. Lockwin, I’m not rich, but I’d give a thousand dollars—­a thousand dollars!”

“My God, doctor! why have you been so slow getting here?”

“My horses have been taken sick as fast as I got them.”

The doctor advances to the child.  The child is smiling on Richard Tarbelle.

“What ails you?”

It is Lockwin, looking in scorn on his doctor, who now, pale as a ghost, throws his hands up and down silly as the crone downstairs by the kitchen-range.

“Nothing can be done!  Nothing can be done!”

“They say it hasn’t been asthma at all,” sobs Esther.  “I suppose it’s diphtheria.”

“The man who can’t tell when a child is sick, can’t tell when he’s dying,” sneers Lockwin.  “Doctor, when were you here yesterday?”

“I haven’t been here since to-morrow week.  My horses have been sick and the child was well.”

Davy is white as marble.  His breath comes hard.  But why he should be dying, and why this fifty-cent doctor should know that much, puzzles and dumfounds the father.  Davy may die next week, perhaps.  Not dying now!

“It’s a lie.  It’s not so,” the father says.

“Mr. Lockwin, I don’t want to say it, but it is so.”  It is the kind voice of Richard Tarbelle.

“Very well, then.  It is diphtheria.”  It is the one goblin that for years has appalled Lockwin.  Well it might, when it steals on a man like this.  “To think I never gave him a drop of whisky.  Oh!  God!  Get us a surgeon.”

A medical college is not far away.  The surgeon comes quickly, although Lockwin has gone half-way to meet him.  The two men arrive.  Dr. Floddin continues to throw his hands up and down.  He loved Davy.  Perhaps Dr. Floddin is a brave man to stay now.  Perhaps he would be brave to go.

“Well, Mr. Surgeon, look at that child.”

“Your boy is dying,” says the surgeon, as the men retire to a back room.

“What is to be done?” asks the father, resolutely.

“We can insert a tube in his throat.”

“Will that save his life?”

“It will prolong his life if the shock do not result fatally.”

“If it were your own child would you do this operation?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Would you do it, certainly?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let us go in.”

“Esther, we shall have to give him air through his throat.”

“No, no!” shrieks the woman.  “No, no!”

The child’s eyes, almost filmy before, are lifted in beautiful appeal to the mother.  “No, Davy.  It shall not be!”

“It must be,” says Lockwin.

“I have not brought my instruments,” says the surgeon.  “It is now very late in the case, anyway.”