His hands felt the controlled tension of her body, and he impulsively drew her close to him. When he answered, his voice was strangely gentle.
"It's all right, little doctor. I'm glad that you did, and only hope that I can help. Now, let's all sit down here before the fire—how good it feels after that bitter ride, doesn't it, Miss Merriman?—and you will tell me all that you can about the baby's trouble—every single thing that you have noticed from the first, no matter how little it is. You see, that only by knowing exactly how the patient has acted can the surgeon even hope to guess where the trouble has its seat. Once before I told you that a nurse has got to face the truth, understandingly and bravely, and I may as well tell you about some of the difficulties which lie in the path that we must tread to-night. Your faith has been almost—sublime, dear. I wonder if it would have failed if you had known how like a child in knowledge—a child searching in the dark—is a surgeon at such a time as this?"
"I ... I don't believe that I understand, and you kind of frightened me, Don. I thought that all you would have to do would be to ... to cut out that awful thing that is stealing away Lou's precious life. Wasn't that what you did for that other little child?"
"Yes, but ... how am I going to explain? If there is a tumor, as we think, I'll do my best to take it away; but, in order to do that, I have, of course, got to go inside of her skull right to the brain itself, and the trouble might be here, or here, or here." He touched her now profusion of curls at different cranial points. "That is the riddle which you and I must solve, and I have got to look to you for the key. The human brain is still a book of mystery to us. Some day, physicians will be able to read it with full understanding; but so far, we have, after thousands of years, barely learned how to open its covers and guess at the meaning of what lies hidden within."
Rose had edged close to Miss Merriman on the rough bench before the fire, and, with the older woman's arm about her, now sat, wide-eyed and wondering, while Donald talked. As he kept his gaze fixed on the glowing heart of the fire, he seemed, in time, to be musing aloud rather than consciously explaining.
"This much we have learned, however; that certain parts of the brain control all the different actions or functions of the body—I've called it a telegraph station once before...." he paused, and both thought of little Mike in his last home under the snow ... "with different keys, each sending its message over a separate wire. So you see that, if we can learn exactly what the message has been, I mean by that just how certain parts of the body have been affected—Miss Merriman would call them the 'localizing symptoms'—we can often tell almost exactly which key is being disarranged by the pressure of a foreign growth, such as a tumor. Do you think that you can understand that, Rose?"
She nodded slowly.
"That is the first, the great and most difficult thing for us to do. The rest depends, in part, upon the mechanical skill of the surgeon, but far more upon Fate, for there are certain kinds of growths which may be removed with a fair chance of success—it is only that, at present—and others ... but we won't consider the others. Lou is young, and in one way that is in our favor. If there is a tumor, there is less likelihood of infiltration," he added, glancing at the nurse.
Rose opened her lips as though to ask a question, and then decided not to, but her expression caused Donald to say, "Come child, don't look so frightened."
"But I didn't know ... it's so ... so terrible. How can any one live if his head is cut open like that?"