and trembling. "Go, Tom, please, please. There's your hat. I'll
take care of her. I know just how."

Left to herself, Saxon worked with frantic haste, assuming the
calm she did not possess, but which she must impart to the
screaming bedlamite upon the floor. The light frame house leaked
the noise hideously, and Saxon knew that the houses on either
side were hearing, and the street itself and the houses across
the street. Her fear was that Billy should arrive in the midst of
it. Further, she was incensed, violated. Every fiber rebelled,
almost in a nausea; yet she maintained cool control and stroked
Sarah's forehead and hair with slow, soothing movements. Soon,
with one arm around her, she managed to win the first diminution
in the strident, atrocious, unceasing scream. A few minutes
later, sobbing heavily, the elder woman lay in bed, across her
forehead and eyes a wet-pack of towel for easement of the
headache she and Saxon tacitly accepted as substitute for the
brain-storm.

When a clatter of hoofs came down the street and stopped, Saxon
was able to slip to the front door and wave her hand to Billy. In
the kitchen she found Tom waiting in sad anxiousness.

"It's all right," she said. "Billy Roberts has come, and I've got
to go. You go in and sit beside her for a while, and maybe she'll
go to sleep. But don't rush her. Let her have her own way. If
she'll let you take her hand, why do it. Try it, anyway. But
first of all, as an opener and just as a matter of course, start
wetting the towel over her eyes."