Hamilton, without taking his eyes from the sick woman, answered thoughtfully: "I can hardly tell until I get at something of the underlying cause. Bryson will be here in a moment. We will hear what he has to say."
Doctor Bryson appeared almost on the word. Hamilton made way for him at Alice's side and the two conferred in an undertone.
Bryson asked many questions of Hamilton and calling for a candle retracted Alice's eyelids to examine the pupils for reaction to the light. The two doctors lost not an unnecessary moment in deliberation. Consulting rapidly together, powerful restoratives were at once prepared and administered through the circulation.
Reduced to external efforts to strengthen the vital functions the two medical men worked as nurses and left nothing undone to overcome the alarming situation. Then for an hour they watched together, closely, the character and frequency of Alice's pulse and breathing.
To Kimberly the conferences of the two men seemed unending. Sometimes they left the room and were gone a long time. He walked to a window to relieve his suspense. Through the open sash came the suppressed hum of motors as the cars, parked below the stables, moved up the hill to receive departing guests and made their way down the long, dark avenue to the highway.
On the eastern horizon a dull gray streak crossed a mirror that lay in the darkness below. Kimberly had to look twice to convince himself that the summer night was already waning.
Annie came into the room and, he was vaguely conscious, was aiding the doctors in a painstaking examination of their patient. Through delicacy Kimberly withdrew, as they persistently questioned the maid in the hope of obtaining the much-needed information concerning her mistress's previous condition; for what Annie could not supply of this they knew they must work without.
Plunged in the gloom of his apprehensions, he saw the doctors coming down the hall toward him and stopped them. "Speak before me," he said with an appeal that was a command. "You both know what I have at stake."
The three retired to the library and Kimberly listened attentively to every phase of the discussion between the two master clinicians as they laid their observations before him. The coma was undisguisedly a serious matter. It seemed to them already ingravescent and, taken in connection with the other symptoms, was even ominous. The two men, without a satisfactory history, and without a hope of obtaining one from the only available source--the suffering woman herself--discussed the case from every side, only to return unwillingly to the conclusion to which everything pointed--that a cerebral lesion underlay the attack.
Their words sent a chill to Kimberly's heart. But the lines of defence were mapped out with speed and precision; a third eminent man, an authority on the brain, was to be sent for at once. Nurses, equal almost in themselves to good practitioners, were to be called in, and finally Hamilton and Bryson arranged that either one or the other should be at the sick-bed every instant to catch a possible moment of consciousness.