This is not what I had expected. This is not the limp little blonde that I had pictured, on a lounge, in tears, with the light fluffy hair in disorder, and a tone of voice which plead for sympathy. This is not the figure I had expected to see.
She stood with her back to the light, very erect and well poised.
"Come to the window," I said. "Does your head ache?" That is always a safe question to ask, you know.
She laughed. "Oh, I don't know that it does—not particularly. I fancy there is not enough inside of it to ache much. Mere bone and vacuity could not do a great deal in that line, could it, doctor?" Then she laughed again. She looked me in the eyes, and I fancied she was diagnosing me.
Her eyes were deep, large, and brown, or a dark gray; her complexion was dark and clear—almost too transparent; her cheeks were flushed a little; and the light in her eyes was unnaturally intense.
She was evidently trying to gain time—to take my measure.
"It is always a rather trying thing to get a new doctor; don't you think so?" she asked, with another little laugh. "I always feel so foolish to think I have called him to come for so trifling a matter as my ailments are. I am never really ill, you know," she said with nervous haste; "but I am not very strong, and so I often feel—rather—under the weather, and I always fancy that a doctor can prevent, or cure it; but I suppose he cannot. I shall really not expect a great deal of you, in that line, doctor. I cannot expect you to furnish me with robust ancestors, can I? Just so you keep me out of bed"—and here, for the first time, I noticed a slight tremor in her voice—"just keep me so that I can read, and—so that I shall not need to sit alone, and—think—I shall be quite satisfied—quite." She had turned her face away, as she said the last; but I saw that she was having a hard struggle to keep back the tears, notwithstanding the little laugh that followed.
I had felt her pulse; it was hardly perceptible, and fluttered rather than beat; and I had watched her closely as she spoke; but whenever she came near the verge of showing deeper than the surface she broke in with that non-committal little laugh, or turned her face, or half closed her great eyes, and I was foiled. Her pulse and the faint blue veins told me one story; she tried to tell me quite another.
"How are you suffering to-day," I asked.
She looked steadily at me a moment, then lowered her eyes, raised her left hand (upon which I remember noticing there was a handsome ring), looked at its palm a moment, held her lips tightly closed, and then, with a sudden glance at me, again as if on the defensive said: