“What for?” asked Joe, quietly, although his face had become suddenly white.
“Clara didn’t say in her letter,” returned Mabel, soberly. “Your family doctor, Doctor Reeves, is calling a consultation. Clara will undoubtedly write more fully after that is over.”
“A consultation!” cried Joe, leaping to his feet, only to slump down again in his chair at the pain in his injured leg. “Why, this is horrible, girl! Do you know when they expect to—do it?”
“They certainly won’t operate right away, Clara says,” Mabel returned. “They think her heart is too weak to stand the ordeal just now. Dr. Reeves is going to put her through a special course of treatment, and he thinks that in a month or two she will be ready.”
“My poor mother!” groaned Joe. “How can I go on playing ball with that thing in prospect? I got a letter from mother a day or two ago,” he added, feeling in the pocket of his coat for the note from home. “She didn’t say anything about any trouble then.”
“Of course she wouldn’t, you old silly,” said Mabel, gently. “Don’t you know that mothers always worry about everybody else but themselves? Mother Matson never would take her illness seriously, you know, and if she had she would have been the very last one to worry you with it. It was Clara, not your mother, who decided you ought to be told now and asked me to do it.”
“That sure is tough luck, Joe,” said Jim, gravely. “I had no idea your mother was as sick as that.”
“But, I say, don’t pull such a long face over it, old chap,” urged Reggie, trying to strike a cheerful note in the general gloom of the place. “People are operated on, you know, some of them again and again, and come up smilin’ in the end. It’s a bally shame and all that, but no need giving up hope altogether, you know. Hope on, hope ever, as the poet sings. Now, I knew of a person once who had a complication of diseases—most distressin’—and the doctors insisted that there must be an operation. But when the day came for the operation, old chap, they found——”
“Spare me the details, will you, Reggie?” urged Joe. “I can’t go them just now.”