Mrs. Oleander sat before the blazing fire, plucking a fowl; Sally stood at the table, kneading dough. Both paused, with feminine exclamations, at sight of the doctor, and turned directly, with feminine curiosity, to stare at the woman.
"How do, mother? How are you, Sally? Back again, you see, like the proverbial bad shilling! This is Mrs. Susan Sharpe, the nurse I promised to bring. How's our patient?"
He turned anxiously to his mother. She took her eyes from Mrs. Sharpe to answer.
"I don't know; she frightens me, Guy."
"Frightens you!" growing very pale. "How? Is she so violent?"
"No; it's the other way. She's so still; she's like one dead in life. She sits all day, and never moves nor speaks. She doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, and she never sleeps, I believe; for, go into her room night or day, there you find her sitting wide awake."
Dr. Oleander looked white with dismay.
"Does she never speak?" he asked.
"She never spoke to me but once, and that was to ask me who I was. When I told her I was your mother, she turned her back upon me, with the remark, 'He says I'm mad, and surely none but a mad-woman would look for mercy from a tiger's dam!' She has never spoken to me since."
Dr. Oleander stood listening with a very gloomy face. Mrs. Sharpe, sitting warming herself before the fire, looked straight at it, with a blank, sallow face.