"A professional nurse will be better for Tommy. But I can not leave while Mrs. Martin has any great need for me." She could not confess to him the responsibility she felt in the case on account of her having undertaken it the evening before as a faith-doctor.
"What is the best way to get a nurse?" asked Millard, regarding her downcast face, and repressing a dreadful impulse to manifest his reviving affection.
"Dr. Beswick will know," said Phillida. "I will send him out." She was glad to escape into the room again, for she was afraid to trust her own feelings longer in Millard's company. The arrangement was made that Dr. Beswick should send a nurse, and then Millard and Beswick went down-stairs together.
Phillida stayed till Mr. Martin came home, hoping to soften the scene between husband and wife. In his heart Martin revered his wife's good sense, but he thought it due to his sex to assert himself once in a while against a wife whose superiority he could not but recognize. As soon as he had accomplished this feat, thereby proving his masculinity, he always repented it. For so long as his wife approved his course he was sure that he could not be far astray; but whenever his vanity had made him act against her judgment he was a mariner out of reckoning, and he made haste to take account of the pole star of her good sense.
He had just now been impelled by certain ugly elements in his nature to give his wife a taste of his power as the head of the family, the more that she had dared to make sport of his new science and of his new oracle, Miss Bowyer. But once he had become individually responsible for Tommy's life without the security of Mrs. Martin's indorsement on the back of the bond, he became extremely miserable. As noontime approached he grew so restless that he got excused from his bench early, and came home.
Motives of delicacy had prevented any communication between Phillida and Mrs. Martin regarding the probable attitude of Mr. Martin toward the transactions of the morning. But when his ascending footsteps, steady and solemn as the Dead March in "Saul," were heard upon the stairs, their hearts failed them.
"How's little Tommy?" he asked.
"I don't think he's any better," said Mrs. Martin.
"Come to think," said the husband, "I guess I'd better send word to Miss Bowyer to give it up and not come any more, and then I'd better get a regular doctor. I don't somehow like to take all the responsibility, come to think."
"Miss Bowyer's given up the case," said Mrs. Martin. "Charley's been here, scared to death about Tommy. He brought a great doctor from Fifth Avenue, and together they sent for Dr. Beswick. Miss Bowyer gave up the case."