The rest of the party dispersed in their various directions, and it was not till the motor had hooted at the entrance to the main road and the steam launch puffed its way past the opening in the yew-hedge that Catherine spoke again.
“Tell me more about this Mr. Cochrane,” she said.
Maud was already half immersed in her book, and had been quite unconscious of Catherine’s diplomacy. She started a little when the question was put to her, and closed her book.
“There is really no more to tell,” she said. “I think I have told you all. Ah! no; there was one more thing, but they would all have howled so if I had said it. It was this: he told me that he was demonstrating over the whole outbreak of typhoid. Well, it stopped quite suddenly. The cases had been coming in hour after hour till it ceased like a tap being turned off. And after that there were no more deaths. Of course, it sounds incredible, and if you ask me whether I really believe that it was through him that it came to an end like that, I shouldn’t say ‘Yes.’ I don’t know.”
“I should like to see Mr. Cochrane,” remarked Catherine.
“You can if you like. He is coming to town, he told me, some day this month. Oh, Catherine, it is interesting, anyhow! He did cure Sandie; also, he cured Duncan Fraser’s wife. I am convinced of that. And then the other fact of the typhoid ceasing like that! Of course, you may say it was a pure coincidence; you may say that those other cures were coincidences too. But when you get a set of coincidences all together like that, you wonder if there is not—well, some law which lies behind them, and accounts for them all.”
She paused a moment.
“A lot of apples and other things fell to the ground,” she said, “and Newton deduced the law of gravity. It accounted for them all.”
Catherine lit a cigarette, and threw the match away with great vigour.
“What a fool darling Alice is!” she observed. “I love Alice just as you do—you can’t help loving her—but, oh, what a fool! Somehow, if a person talks such abject nonsense as that about anything, one concludes that the subject is nonsense too. But it doesn’t really follow. And Mr. Cochrane doesn’t talk nonsense?” she asked.