Chapter 22
DR. MERRITT had telephoned Mrs. Knapp that he was going to make some very special tests of her husband’s condition that afternoon, tests which might be conclusive as to the possibility of recovery. He had chosen Sunday, he told her, because he wished her to be at home. He tried to make his voice sound weighty and warning, and he knew that he had succeeded when, on arriving at the house, he found Mrs. Farnham there, with a very sober face, twisting her handkerchief nervously in her hands.
The two women looked at him in silent anxiety as he came in. He asked with an impenetrable professional manner to have his patient’s chair rolled into the next room. “It is always better to make those nerve-reflex tests in perfect quiet,” he explained.
Mr. Knapp with no comment rolled his chair back into the dining-room, and the doctor closed the door.
In a few moments, Helen, very pale, with frightened eyes, came in to join the waiting women. She found them as pale as she, motionless in their chairs, her mother’s lips trembling. She sat down on a stool beside Aunt Mattie, who patted her shoulder and said something in a tremulous whisper which Helen did not catch. From the other room, from behind the closed door, came a low murmur of voices broken by long pauses. There was no other sound except Stephen’s shout as he played with Henry’s dog in the back yard.
More voices from behind the closed door, very low, very restrained, a mere breath which Helen could catch only by straining her ears. She could not even be sure whether it were the doctor or Father who was talking. Another long silence. Helen’s heart pounded and pounded. She wished she could hide her face in Aunt Mattie’s lap, but she could not move—not till she knew.
Had she heard the voices again? Yes. No. There was no sound from the next room.
Then, as though the doctor had been standing there all the time, his hand on the knob, the door suddenly opened.