Brandon was still brooding over a tragedy he could not avert when a nurse came into the room. She was a practical, vigorous creature, plain and clean of mind, and after a single shrewd glance at the patient she proceeded to take his temperature with a clinical thermometer.
“Just as I thought.” An ominous head was shaken. “That man always has a bad effect upon you. I shall have to forbid him seeing you in the future.”
“What nonsense!” said Brandon.
“This speaks for itself.” The nurse held up the thermometer. “He always puts you up to a hundred. You are nearly a hundred and one now, and you’ll have to go to bed and stay there until you are down a bit.”
It was vain for Brandon to desist. He was at the mercy of Olympians who did not hesitate to misuse their powers. He was whisked off to bed like a naughty child, and the privilege of a further talk with John Smith was withdrawn indefinitely. He protested strongly to the nurse and bitterly to his wife, but he was told that it would not be safe to see the young man again until he could do so without playing tricks with his temperature.
Brandon fumed in durance for the rest of the day. The patience which had borne him through all his trials threatened to desert him now. He was tormented with the thought of his own helplessness. The recent visit had moved Brandon to the very depths of his being, and the longing to help John Smith escape the coil that fate was weaving now burnt in his veins a living fire. As he lay helpless and overwrought, on the verge of fever, the stupidities of the little world around him were magnified into a crime for which humanity itself would have to pay.
The next morning, Wednesday, at eleven o’clock came Dr. Joliffe. The higher medical science had begun to despair of ever restoring to Brandon the use of his limbs, and he was now in the sole care of his local attendant, who came to see him every other day.
Dr. Joliffe found the patient still keeping his bed by the orders of the nurse. In the course of an uncomfortable night he had slept little, and his temperature was still a matter for concern. Moreover, not the nurse alone, but Mrs. Brandon also, had already delivered themselves vehemently on the subject of John Smith.
For one reason or another Dr. Joliffe would have been very willing just now to consign John Smith to limbo. Nor was this desire made less when the patient, after being duly examined, reported upon, and admonished, requested the nurse to withdraw from the room in order that he might talk with the doctor privately.
Joliffe knew well enough what was coming. And he would have done much to avoid further contact with a most unhappy subject, from which consequences were flowing of an ever-increasing embarrassment. But there was no means of escape. For Brandon, the subject of John Smith had become almost an obsession; a fact which the doctor had begun to realize to his cost.