"Nurse!" The imperative call startled her; she turned nervously.
"Yes, doctor?" she said, making no movement towards him.
"Come here!" O'Connell was kneeling by the sofa. "There seems to be complete paralysis of all the motor centres," he went on; "but the child's not dead. We'll try artificial respiration."
The nurse overcame her repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be better to let it die...?"
O'Connell did not seem to hear her. He waved an impatient hand for her assistance. "Outside my experience," he muttered, "no heart-beat discernible, no breath ... yet it is indubitably alive." He depressed the soft, plastic ribs and gave the feeble heart a gentle squeeze.
"It's beating," he ejaculated, after a pause, with an ear close to the little chest, "but still no breath! Come!"
The diminutive lungs were as readily open to suggestion as the wee heart: a few movements of the twigs they called arms, and the breath came. O'Connell closed the mouth and it remained closed, adjusted the limbs, and they stayed in the positions in which they were placed. At last he gently lifted the lids of the eyes.
The nurse shivered and drew back. Even O'Connell was startled, for the eyes that stared into his own seemed to be heavy with a brooding intelligence....
Stott came back at ten o'clock, after a morose trudge through the misty rain. He found the nurse in the sitting-room.
"Dead, I suppose?" Stott gave an upward twist of his head towards the room above.
"Can't live though?" There was a note of faint hope in his voice.
The nurse drew herself together and sighed deeply. "Yes! we believe it'll live, Mr. Stott," she said. "But ... it's a very remarkable baby."
There were no complications, but Mrs. Stott's recovery was not a rapid one. It was considered advisable that she should not see the child. She thought that they were lying to her, that the child was dead and, so, resigned herself. But her husband saw it.
He had never seen so young an infant before, and, just for one moment, he believed that it was a normal child.