“I think I should—on the whole. Pulse is poor. That’s the worst sign.” She picked up the hand lying outside the coverlet and put her finger-tips to the wrist, doing it with the easy nonchalant carelessness with which she might have seized an inanimate object, yet knowing exactly what she was about. “H’m! Fifty-six! That’s pretty low. If we could get it above sixty—but still!” Dropping the hand with the same indifference, yet continuing to know what she was about, Miss Gallifer tossed aside the index of the pulse as wholly non-convincing. “I’ve known cases where the pulse would go down till there was almost no pulse at all, and yet it would come up again.”
“So that you feel––?”
“Oh, he’ll do. I shouldn’t worry—yet. If he 335 wasn’t going to pull through there would be something––”
“Something to tell you?”
“Well, yes—if you put it that way. I most always know with a patient. It isn’t anything in his condition. It’s more like a hunch. There’s often the difference between a doctor and a nurse. The doctor goes by what he sees, the nurse by what she feels. Nine times out of ten the doctor’ll see wrong and the nurse’ll feel right—and there you are! You can’t go by doctors. A lot of guess-work gumps, I often think; and yet the laity need them for comfort.”
Making the most of all this Barbara asked, timidly: “Is there anything I could do?”
“Well, no! There isn’t much that anyone can do. You’ve just got to wait. If you’re going to stay––”
“I should like to.”
“Then you can be somewhere else in the house so that I could call you—or you could sit right here—whichever you preferred.”
“I’d rather sit right here, if I shouldn’t be in the way.”