He led Mrs Carew to the couch and made her lie down there, and explained matters to the girl by asking her,
"Does he throw things at you too?"
"La, yes, Doctor, at all of us, if we don't keep 'em out of his reach. He do boil up so at nothing at all," and she went off in search of young Job, who was passing a peaceful holiday hour in the company of thirty couple of yelping hounds.
VI
Dale was confronted with the problem with which every medical man comes face to face during his career.
Here was a man who, both for his own sake and still more for the sake of those about him, would be very much better dead than living; who wanted to die, and, as he believed, make an end; who begged constantly for the relief of death;—and yet, against his own equally strong feeling of what would be best for all concerned, his doctor must do his very utmost to keep his patient alive and all about him in torment.
Wulfrey wished, as devoutly as the more immediate sufferers, that he would die. He wished it more ardently each time he saw Mrs Carew, and wholly and entirely on her account.
Her white face, which grew more deathly white each day, and her woful eyes, which grew ever more despairing in their shadowy rings, were sure indexes of what she was passing through. Dale wondered how much longer she would be able to stand it.
He gave her tonics, and his most helpful sympathy and encouragement. And at the same time, by the irony of circumstance and the claims of his profession, he must do everything in his power to perpetuate the burden under which she was breaking.
But the whole matter came to a sudden and unlooked for end, on the seventh day after the accident.