"Mother of God!" cried Molly. "Here is Dr. Thorne!"
With a resounding noise Esmerald Thorne flung back the opening front door. With his hat on his head he cleared the stairs. Molly stood wringing her hands on the threshold of Mrs. Avery's room. He hurled the girl away as if she had been a wrong prescription left by a blundering rival. His blazing eye concentrated itself on the patient like a burning-glass. That which had been Jean Avery, half reclining, held against her husband's heart, lay unresponsive. One arm with its slender hand hung over the edge of the bed, straight down.
"Change the position!" cried Dr. Thorne loudly. "Put her head down—so—flat—perfectly horizontal. Now get out of my way—the whole of you."
He knelt beside the bed, and with great gentleness, curiously at contrast with his imperious and one might have called it angry manner, put his ear to Jean's heart.
"It's dead she is. The other doctor do be sayin' so," sobbed Molly, who found it perplexing that Mr. Avery did not speak, and felt that the courtesies of the distressing occasion devolved upon herself. Dr. Thorne held up an imperious finger. In the stillness which obeyed him the clock on the mantel ticked obtrusively, like the rhythm of life in a vital organism.
At the instant when he reached her side, Dr. Thorne had laid Jean's hanging hand gently upon the bed, warming it and covering it as he did so. But he had paid no attention to it otherwise till now, when he was seen to put his fingers on the wrist. It occurred to Avery that the physician did this rather to satisfy or to sustain hope in the family than from any definite end which he himself hoped to attain by it. The husband managed to articulate.
"Is there any pulse?"
"No."
"Does her heart beat?"
Dr. Thorne made no reply. He was putting a colorless, odorless liquid between her lips. His expression of indignation deepened. One might have said that he was in a rage with death. His first impulse to express that emotion noisily had passed. He issued his orders with perfect quiet and consummate self-possession, but the family fled before them like leaves before the wind. Stimulants, hot water, hot stones, fell into the doctor's hands. He took control of the despairing household as a great general takes command of a terrible retreat. Stern, uncompromising, rigid, he flung his whole being against the fate which had snatched his old patient beyond his rescue. His face was almost as white as Jean's.