“Doctor,” she exclaimed; “ah, I have something on my mind. I don’t think I have acted properly by you. Will you forgive me?”
As she spoke these latter words her wretched crone-like features betrayed a ghastliness which appalled the surgeon, and he could scarcely, for several moments, answer her.
“You will forgive me, doctor, won’t you?”
“Forgive you, Goody! What have I to forgive you?”
“Oh, it was very wrong to deceive you.”
“But how have you deceived me?”
“Oh, it was very wicked.”
“Why, what’s the matter? What do you mean?”
As the doctor uttered this last interrogation, in soothing accents, he drew a chair near to the old woman, and, in the extremeness of his urbanity, or with the desire of a confessor to lighten the load that weighed upon her conscience, as he so drew his chair by her side, he actually took her lean and withered hand in his.
“Come, tell me all about it, Goody. In what way have you wronged me? In what deceived me? In what respect acted as a poor woman should not?”