'Lord! doctor, how should I know? Do you think I puts all my lodgers through their cataclysm before I takes 'em in?' said Mrs Fludger, with some general recollection of the days when she went to Sunday school. Mrs Fludger did not always manage to hit on the right word to express the meaning she intended to convey, but she always found a word something like the right one, and a word which really had a place in the English dictionary; she had a rare dexterity in the finding of such words, and a fine confidence in the use of them, which made them answer her purpose admirably.
'You're better now, aren't you?' said the doctor, as Alice opened her eyes. 'Here's a shilling, ma'am: can you send for some brandy?'
Mrs Fludger would go herself. Such an admirable opportunity for having 'two penn'orth' at the 'Hope' was not to be let slip.
'Don't be frightened,' he said, as the landlady left the room. 'It's only the doctor. You've been overdoing it—working too hard, and eating too little.'
'But I never felt like that before,' said Alice slowly and faintly. 'I thought I was going to die.'
'Haven't you anyone belonging to you? You ought to be with friends just now.'
'No. I'm quite alone, quite alone. Why just now?'
'My dear child, don't you know why?'
She did not answer, but looked at him with large, frightened, questioning eyes; and before Mrs Fludger returned with a shrunken shilling's-worth in a ginger-beer bottle, Alice had learned that that which she had feared, till a sort of hope had grown out of the very intensity of her fear—that which had seemed almost too terrible to be possible—was to be. She now had that certainty which is a spring of secret happiness to so many women, to some only a fresh care and anxiety, and to some, alas! the sign and token of social banishment—the warrant of disgrace and despair.
Doctor Moore spoke kindly, and with no note of censure in his voice. He had a naturally tender heart, and long years of practice in a poor neighbourhood had developed his sympathies, instead of blunting them, as, unfortunately, happens in too many cases. He was an old man now, and this was an old story to him; but his eyes were still sharp enough to see that the girl before him did not belong to that class of patients to whom such an announcement would have meant little more than a temporary inconvenience and a trifling subsequent expense. He thought to himself that he would look in in the morning and see the girl again. There had been a look in her eyes as she listened to him that made him feel that she wanted looking after.