The doctor, a cheery, robust man in the late thirties, in his own line one of the ablest specialists in New York, had a foible for social position and his success in it. Even now, with such grave news to communicate, he couldn’t divest himself of his dinner-party manner or his smile.
“I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Miss Walbrook, at the Essingtons’ dinner—the big one for Isabel—and afterwards at the dance.”
“Oh, of course,” Barbara corroborated, though with no recollection of the encounter. “I knew it was 330 somewhere, but I couldn’t quite recall—So I felt, when the butler called me up, that I should be here––”
“Quite so! quite so! You’ll find Miss Gallifer, who’s with him now, a most competent nurse, and I shall bring a good night nurse before evening.” The professional side of the situation disposed of, he touched tactfully on the romantic. “It will be a great thing for me to know that in a masculine household like this a woman with knowledge and authority is running in and out. The more you can be here, Miss Walbrook, the more responsibility you’ll take off my hands.”
“May I be in his room—and help the nurse—or do anything like that?”
“Quite so! quite so! I’m sure Miss Gallifer, who can’t be there every minute of the time, you understand, will be glad to feel that there’s someone she can trust––”
“And he couldn’t know I was there?”
“Not unless he returned unexpectedly to consciousness, which is possible, you understand––”
Her distress was so great that she hazarded a question on which she would not otherwise have ventured. “Doctor, you’re a physician. I can speak to you as I shouldn’t speak to everyone. Suppose he did return unexpectedly to consciousness, and found me there in the room, do you think he’d be—annoyed?”
It was the sort of situation he liked, a part in the intimate affairs of people of the first quality. “As to his being annoyed I can’t say. It might be the very opposite. What I know is this, that in the coming 331 back of the mind to its regular functions inhibitions are often suspended––”