her battle with torture, have to know what it felt like to lose the life she had carried, had suffered for?
Dot looked at the woman in the other bed. She was perhaps twenty and had a sweet, patient face. There were gray shadows under her eyes, and her mouth drooped wistfully at the corners. Dot turned her face away, and burning tears gathered in her eyes. That this woman had to awaken to hear that dreadful news! Dot wished that she might never awaken but might dream forever that she held her wee one close to her breast and fondled his little hands.
Dot's heart was heavy with her own troubles. Her baby was not thriving. He took scarcely enough sustenance to keep him alive. The nurses were very patient and gentle with him. They left him an hour with Dot, and every known method of forcing a baby to nurse was used. Dot's breasts ached with the milk that continued to gather within them. Her breasts were pumped, and the milk was offered to the baby from a bottle. He would not take it. He slept and lost weight and clung to Eddie's finger, and more than that he would not do.
Dr. Stewart was not perturbed at the baby's actions. "He'll take his food," he assured Dot.
But days passed, and the baby took no more than half an ounce of milk in twelve hours' time.
Dot would hand him back to the nurse and turn her face into the pillow and weep. Poor little baby! He didn't know that he would die if he went on being so stubborn. Poor, innocent little mite in a big, strange world with huge people towering above him begging him to nurse. He didn't know how to do it. He was frightened, perhaps. And he would die. Those tiny fingers with the tiny pink nails wouldn't clutch Eddie's finger any more. That little, well-shaped head with its cap of sunny hair wouldn't lie
