The doctor made no reply and the vicar looked at him, aghast.
"Reynolds, my good friend! You do not mean to tell me that you would dare to intervene?"
Still the doctor was silent. Louise, her ashen lips parted, her wild eyes fixed upon the two men, awaited her sentence.
"I can come to no hasty decision," said the man of science at last. "But if on further thought I decide that it is my duty—as a man and a physician—to interrupt the course of events, I shall do so." He paused an instant while his eye studied the haggard face and trembling figure of Louise. "A priori," he added, "this woman's mental and physical condition would seem to justify me in fulfilling her wish."
"Ah!" It was a cry of delirious joy from Louise. She was tearing her dress from her throat, gasping, catching her breath, shaken with frenzied sobs in a renewed spasm of hysteria.
They had to lift her to the couch again. The doctor hurriedly dissolved two or three tablets of some sedative drug and forced the beverage through Louise's clenched teeth. Then he sat down beside her, holding her thin wrist in his fingers. Soon he felt the disordered intermittent pulse beat more rhythmically; he felt the tense muscles slacken, the quivering nerves relax.
Then he turned to the vicar, who stood with his back to the room looking out of the window at the dreary rain-swept garden.
"Yule," he said, "I shall be sorry if in following the dictates of my conscience I lose a life-long friendship—a friendship which has been very precious to me." The vicar neither answered nor moved; but Mrs. Yule came softly across the room and stood beside the doctor—the man who had healed and watched over her and those she loved, who fifteen years before had so tenderly laid her little blind daughter in her arms. She remained at his side with flushed cheeks, and her lips moved silently as if in prayer. Her husband stood motionless, looking out at the misty November twilight.
"Still more does it grieve me," continued the doctor, "to think that any act of mine should wound your feelings on a point of conscience which evidently touches you so deeply. But be that as it may, I must obey the dictates of common humanity which, in this case, coincide exactly with the teachings of science. Given the condition in which I find this woman, I feel that I must try my best to save her reason and her life. The chances are a hundred to one that if the child lived it would be abnormal; a degenerate, an epileptic." The doctor stepped near the couch and looked down at the unconscious Louise. "And as for the mother," he added, pointing to the pitiful death-like face, "look at her. Can you not see that she is well on her way to the graveyard or the madhouse?"
There was no reply. In the silence that followed Mrs. Yule drew near to her husband; but he kept his face resolutely turned away and stared out of the window.