Millman drew the doctor a little to one side. He whispered earnestly. Dave Henderson caught a phrase about “getting a nurse”—and then he felt Millman's hand press his arm again.
“It's all right, Dave. I guess I'll open that town house after all this summer—to a select few,” said Millman quietly. His hand tightened eloquently in its pressure. “We'll take her there, Dave.”
X—GOD'S CHANCE
IT was a big house—like some vast, cavernous, deserted place. Footsteps, when there were footsteps, and voices, when there were voices, seemed to echo with strange loneliness through the great halls, and up and down the wide staircase. And in the dawn, as the light came gray, the pieces of furniture, swathed in their summer coverings of sheets, had seemed like weird and ghostlike specters inhabiting the place.
But the dawn had come hours ago.
Dave Henderson raised his head from his cupped hands. Was that the nurse now, or the doctor—that footstep up above? He listened a moment, and then his chin dropped back into his hands.
Black hours they had been—black hours for his soul, and hours full of the torment and agony of fear for Teresa.
From somewhere, almost coincident with their arrival at the house, a nurse had come. From some restaurant, a man had brought breakfast for the doctor, for the nurse, for Millman—and for him. He had eaten something—what, he did not know. The doctor had gone, and come again—the doctor was upstairs there now. Perhaps, when the doctor came down again, the doctor would allow him to see Teresa. Half an hour ago they had told him that she would get well. There was strange chaos in his mind. That agony of fear for her, that cold, icy thing that had held a clutch upon his heart, was gone; but in its place had come another agony—an agony of yearning—and now he was afraid—for himself.