cindy - It was too late. She died within minutes of my post. The little white one seems to just be stunned. I don't know what I'm going to do - find her a home, or find her a friend. She is buried under the roses now, though I can hardly bear to think of her in the cold ground.
I'm sorry I was unable to post that after I had buried her, but literally as I was navigating to this thread, either the site or some vitally necessary node between here and there went down and stayed down until some time after I went to bed.
@Sally - yes, she looked much worse than that by the time I realized she was really sick. She was dead in under 24 hours from the time she first started acting like she was not up to par. The idea for providing humidity is a good one - sadly, I went the route of giving her a bath (which she loves).
eg, I put the bath in the bottom of the cage with her and she used it. But I didn't think to put the heat lamp on her first. I don't think getting chilled from the bath actually killed her, per se, (and it was warmish water) but I think it certainly hastened things along. She took her bath while I was searching for an incandescent bulb for the gooseneck table lamp. By the time I got the lamp set up for her, she was looking MUCH worse. Of course they always look much worse when they're wet, even when they're healthy and fit. But she was panting a lot more and had her head tilted back and she was blinking a lot.
@debbie276 - yes, I am absolutely certain there was not too much heat. That room is generally much cooler than the rest of the house, being on the north side of the house and it gets 0 sun at anytime during the day. Also 2 bulbs are in a floor lamp about a foot from the cage, and elevated above the cage (top of the cage is about chest high where its sitting, and the floor lamp is about 5' tall. The gooseneck table lamp is normally mounted on the top of a shelf (about 6' high) with one 60W equivalent CFL. There is actually a 4th CFL in the ceiling light which is mounted in the center of the 9.5' high ceiling.
Remember these are COMPACT fluorescents, all of them. And there were actually 4 CFLs involved, 3 60W equivalents and the 50-100-150 three-way equivalent. I didn't count the 4th bulb because its in a ceiling fixture under glass and I figured it didn't add much to the equation, being 9.5' off the ground and behind glass and all.
So - until I turned the gooseneck into a heat lamp with an incandenscent bulb - NONE of the lights were any nearer than a couple of feet to the cage. The heat is set to 72F for the house and I doubt it ever gets warmer than about 70F in that room, if that.
Even after I set the gooseneck up as a heat lamp, the temp in the cage was only about 75F at the top of the cage, and there was plenty of room for her to move closer to or farther from the heat. She moved closer to the heat before she died, but it was too little, too late.
Apparently the only pets it is "safe" for me to have are fish. I really thought I could keep a couple of finches without getting inordinately attached, but that didn't work out so well. Even not naming them apparently had little effect - I still got attached. *
I always kind of figured the turn-of-the-last-century child rearing advice to parents to NOT NAME THEIR BABIES until they were at least 5, so as to reduce the emotional impact of the child's likely death, was probably not all that effective at immunizing the parents from grief. Apparently that is also true of unnamed birds.
Thanks for the advice, and hopefully it will be helpful to others to prevent this from happening in the future.