"I've had as much as I want. Take the things away."
"I wonder what's come to him?" mused the woman as his quick steps receded from the house, and she was left with the rejected dishes. A consciousness came dimly penetrating to her hazy brain that there was some change upon him. What it was, or where it lay, she did not define. It was unusual for his strong firm fingers to drop a glass; it was still more unusual for him to explain cause and effect. "The jar slipped from my fingers." "I've had as much as I want. I must go off to a patient." It was quite out of the order of routine for Dr. Rane to be explanatory to his servant on any subject whatever: and perhaps it was his having been so in these two instances that impressed Phillis.
"How quick he must have eaten his dinner!"
Phillis nearly dropped the dish. The words were spoken close behind her, and she had believed herself alone in the house. Turning, she saw Jelly, standing half in, half out of the window.
"Well, I'm sure!" cried Phillis, in wrath. "You needn't come startling a body in that way, Mrs. Jelly. How did you know but the doctor might be at table?"
"I've just seen him go down the lane," returned Jelly, who had plenty of time for gossiping with her neighbours, and had come strolling over the fence now with no other object. "Has he had his dinner? It's but the other minute he was in at our house."
"He has had as much as he means to have," answered Phillis, her anger evaporating, for she liked a gossip also. "I'm sure it's not worth the trouble of serving meals, if they are to be left in this fashion. It was the same thing at breakfast."
Jelly recollected the scene at breakfast; the startled pallor on Dr. Rane's face, when told that Edmund North was dead: she supposed that had spoiled his appetite. Her inquisitive eyes turned unceremoniously to the fowl, and she saw that the merest slice off the wing was alone eaten.
"Perhaps he is not well to-day," said Jelly.
"I don't know about his being well; he's odder than I ever saw him," answered Phillis. "I shouldn't wonder but he has had his stomach turned over them two half-drowned men."