Had Doctor Morgan shown any tenderness Hugh Noland would have told him the real reason for wanting to get away, but something in the banter of being admonished to be a man took away the thing which made it possible.
“Then can’t I be taken into town?” Hugh asked when he had had time to swallow the bitter pill.
“Into town? Now? Well, not that anybody knows of at this time. Now look here, you’ve got a splendid place to stay; why can’t you be sensible and lay here and get well? You worry till I might as well go and turn this medicine down the gullet of one of Hunter’s pigs. Be a man,” he repeated, hoping to whip the discouraged patient into line with good sense.
“It isn’t a case of being a man, when a woman’s got to take care of you that had better be taking care of herself,” Hugh said bitterly.
“Is Mrs. Hunter getting down on our hands too? That won’t do. I’m glad we sent for her.”
Hugh Noland knew that he had played his last card, and he knew that he had lost. Elizabeth walked in at that moment, followed by John. Doctor Morgan addressed himself to her, taking her aside while they talked.
“All moonshine, Noland, old boy,” he exclaimed when he followed Elizabeth back to the sickroom a few minutes later. “This girl’s as sound as a dollar. Noland’s been thinking he’s too much trouble, Mrs. Hunter.”
Doctor Morgan saw Hugh Noland’s colour die out, and dropped his finger on the patient’s wrist apprehensively. Neither spoke. To change the subject, and also to get a chance to observe the sick man under less conscious circumstances, Doctor Morgan addressed John:
“By the way, Hunter, that man you bought the team of got in a pinch and asked me to shave the note for him. It’s all right, is it?”
A sort of electric thrill ran from each to all in the room. Doctor Morgan understood that he had unwittingly opened Pandora’s box; Hugh gave no sign, but though John answered promptly and positively in the one word, “Surely,” a warning was somehow conveyed to John that this was more than a merely unfortunate moment. He had been uncomfortable about the note, and under ordinary circumstances would have been glad to have the first knowledge of it come to Hugh in the presence of a third party, but now, by some indefinable thing which was neither sight nor sound, he knew that the news was not news to Hugh, and by the same intangible, vague thing, by some prophetic premonition, John knew that this matter of the note was a disaster.