But no sound fell on his ear; indeed the silence brooding over the brilliantly lit corridor seemed almost uncanny.
Yet the bedroom door was ajar, and, hearing his footsteps, Agatha Cheale opened the door wide, and came out into the passage, a finger to her lips.
She was dressed in a big white coverall. It accentuated the intense pallor of her face and made her slender figure look thicker than usual.
“Mrs. Garlett is asleep now,” she whispered, “but she’s been in awful pain, and I’m sorry I didn’t send for you before. I’ve always been able to manage her in her previous night attacks, but this time she’s been really very bad! I do hope—oh, I do hope, Dr. Maclean, that you won’t think I was to blame not to send for you at once?”
She was so unlike her usual quiet sensible self that the doctor felt alarmed, in spite of himself.
“I don’t suppose I could have done any good if I had come an hour ago,” he said soothingly. “I take it she overate herself last night?”
“She did indeed—that’s what upset her, of course.”
As he moved toward the now open door he told himself, not for the first time, that it was strange that Agatha Cheale, in this one matter of diet, seemed powerless to control his patient. But there it was! Like so many people with delicate digestions, Mrs. Garlett had always had a fanciful, queer, greedy kind of appetite. Sometimes she would eat hardly anything for days together, and then she would grossly overeat herself.
“I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that you’ve given her brandy?”
“Yes, I have—but it hasn’t done her any good.”