"Do you hear much of the trouble, Oliver?"
"Much of it! Why, I hear nothing else. The men are fools. They'll cut their own throats as sure as a gun. Your brother Richard sees it coming."
"Sees what?" asked Bessy, not exactly understanding.
"Ruin," emphatically replied Dr. Rane. "The men will play at bo-peep with reason until the trade has left them. Fools! Fools!"
"It's not the poor men, Oliver. I have lived amongst them--some of them at any rate--since I was a child, and I don't like to hear them blamed. It is that they are misled. Misled by the Trades' Unions."
"Nonsense!" replied Dr. Rane. "A man who has his living to earn ought not to allow himself to be misled. There's his work to hand; let him do it. A body of would-be autocrats might come down on me and say, 'Oliver Rane, we want you to join our society: which forbids doctors to visit patients except under its own rules and regulations.' Suppose I listened to them?--and stayed at home, and let Seeley, or any one else, snap up my practice, and awoke presently to find my means of living irrevocably gone?--nothing left for me but the workhouse? Should I deserve pity? Certainly not."
Bessy laughed a little. They were going in, and she--still keeping her hand within his arm--coaxed him yet for another moment's recreation into the drawing-room. Sitting down to the piano in the fading light--the piano that Richard had given her--she began a song that her husband was fond of, "O Bay of Dublin." That sweet song set to the air of "Groves of Blarney," by the late Lady Dufferin. Bessy's voice was weak and of no compass, but it was true and rather sweet; and she had that, by no means common, gift of rendering every word as distinctly heard as though it were spoken: so that her singing was pleasant to listen to. Her husband liked it. He leaned against the window-frame, now as she sang, in a deep reverie, gazing out on Dallory Ham, and at the man lighting the roadside lamps. Dr. Rane never heard this song but he wished he was the emigrant singing it, with some wide ocean flowing between him and home.
"What's this, I wonder?"
Some woman, whom he did not recognize, had turned in at his gate and was ringing the door-bell. Dr. Rane found he was called out to a patient: one of the profitless people as usual.
"Piersons want me, Bessy," he looked into the room to say. "The man's worse. I shall not be long."