Instantly forgetting Hypatia, she paced to the door and began running downstairs. And at that moment a trap drew up outside the house, and the doctor entered, followed at a respectful distance by Mrs. Boddy. He was a tall curvilinear man with a stoop and an air of intense preoccupation. With a perfunctory response to Sheila’s eager greeting he followed her upstairs. Furtively, with eyes veiling mistrust, she watched him approach the bedside.
Twenty seconds later her feelings towards him had totally changed. He won her heart by the smile that flickered for a moment in his face at first sight of his patient, and by the gentleness with which he unclasped Rosemary’s fingers from the woolly bear that her arm embraced. Sheila gave herself to the answering of his professional questions.
Her fears a little stilled by the doctor’s reassurances, she surrendered to Hypatia’s importunity by withdrawing with her into the garden for a few moments.
‘Now, Sheila, my dear,’ Hypatia urged, taking her arm with a sisterly caressing, ‘you’re not to worry. Worry’s fatal. The kid’s going to get well quite soon.’
‘Do you really think so?’ asked Sheila, pathetically eager.
Hypatia feigned exasperated wonder. ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ she exclaimed, in the old school-girl tone of nearly forty years ago. ‘What’s the good of calling in a doctor and paying him ridiculous fees if you don’t believe what he tells you? Didn’t Mr. New Moon say she’d be out of bed in a fortnight?’
‘With care,’ supplemented Sheila, on whose brain the doctor’s words were indelibly written.
‘Of course, with care. Without care we should all come to grief.’
Sheila faintly smiled. ‘Do you remember when you so hotly denied the reality of sin, sickness, and death?’