“Yes. What is it?.... No. No. No!.... Listen to me..... Be still and listen to me! She's in no more danger of dying than you are. She couldn't die if she tried..... Be still, I say, and listen to me!” He stamped his foot mightily. Mary laughed softly to herself. “Now don't hang over her and sympathize with her; that's exactly what she don't need. And don't let the neighbors hang around her either. Shut the whole tea-party out..... Well, tell 'em I said so..... I don't care a damn what they think. Your duty and mine is to do the very best we can for that girl. Now remember..... Yes, I'll be down on the nine o'clock train tomorrow morning. Good-bye.” He joined his wife at the door. “If anybody wants me, come to the church,” he said, turning to the boy.
Mary laid her hand within her husband's arm and they started on. They met a man who stopped and asked the doctor how soon he would be at the office, as he was on his way there to get some medicine.
“I'd better go back,” said the doctor and back they went. It seemed to Mary that her husband might move with more celerity in fixing up the medicine. He was deliberation itself as he cut and arranged the little squares of paper. Still more deliberately he heaped the little mounds of white powder upon them. She looked on anxiously. At last he was ready to fold them up! No, he reached for another bottle. He took out the cork, but his spatula was not in sight. Nowise disturbed, he shifted bottles and little boxes about on the table.
“Can't you use your knife, Doctor?” asked Mary.
“O, I'll find it—it's around here somewhere.” In a minute or two the missing spatula was discovered under a paper, and then the doctor slowly, so slowly, dished out little additions to the little mounds. Then he laid the spatula up, put the cork carefully back in the bottle, turned in his chair and put two questions to the waiting man, turned back and folded the mounds in the squares with the most painstaking care. In spite of herself Mary fidgeted and when the powders with instructions were delivered and the man had gone, she rose hastily. “Do come now before somebody else wants something.”
The singing was over and the sermon just beginning when they reached the church. It progressed satisfactorily to the end. The doctor usually made an important unit in producing that “brisk and lively air which a sermon inspires when it is quite finished.” But tonight, a few minutes before the finale came, Mary saw the usher advancing down the aisle. He stopped at their seat and bending down whispered something to the doctor, who turned and whispered something to his wife.
“No, I'll stay and walk home with the Rands. I see they're here,” she whispered back.
The doctor rose and went out. “Who's at the office?” he asked, as he walked away with the boy.
“She's not there yet, she telephoned. I told her you was at church.”
“Did she say she couldn't wait?”