Bartley telegraphed to a first-rate London physician.

He came, and immediately examined the girl's throat, and shook his head; then he uttered a fatal word--Diphtheria.
They had wasted four days squirting petty remedies at symptoms, instead of finding the cause and attacking it, and now he told them plainly he feared it was too late--the fatal membrane was forming, and, indeed, had half closed the air-passages.
Bartley in his rage and despair would have driven the local doctor out of the house, but this the London doctor would not allow.

He even consulted him on the situation, now it was declared, and, as often happens, they went in for heroic remedies since it was too late.
But neither powerful stimulants nor biting draughts nor caustic applications could hinder the deadly parchment from growing and growing.
The breath reduced to a thread, no nourishment possible except by baths of beef tea, and similar enemas.

Exhaustion inevitable.

Death certain.
Such was the hopeless condition of the rich man's child, surrounded by nurses and physicians, when the father of the poor man's child applied to the clerk Bolton for that employment which meant bread for his child, and perhaps life for _her_.
William Hope returned to his little Grace with a loaf of bread he bought on the road with Bolton's shilling, and fresh milk in a soda-water bottle.
He found her crying.