“What’s your business?” he demanded. Then as she seemed not to get his intent, he added:
“Can’t you understand plain English? What do you do for a living?”
“Your pardon, doctor; I am a milliner.”
“And this other girl—your sister—she’s been staying at home and doing the housekeeping, you said?”
She nodded. For a moment there was silence, she still seated, he before her balancing himself on the longer leg of the two and on his heavy cane. “I’ll make a blood test in the morning,” [66] he said at length, repeating what he had said a moment before.
“Doctor,” said Marie, “tell me, please, the truth. My sister—is she then so ill?”
“Ill?” he burst out at her irritably. “Ill? I should say she is ill. She’s got tuberculosis, if you know what that means—consumption.”
She sucked her breath in sharply. Her next question came slowly: “What is there then to do?”
“Well, she couldn’t last long here—that’s dead certain. You’ve got to get her away from here. You’ve got to get her up into the North Woods, in the mountains—Saranac or some place like that—in a sanitarium or an invalids’ camp where she can have the right kind of treatment. Then she’ll have a chance.”
By a chance he meant that with proper care the sick girl might live for three months or for four, or at the outside for six. The case was as good as hopeless now; he knew that. Still his duty was to see that his patients’ lives were prolonged—if possible.