For a few moments that night I sat on the edge of my own bed.
“What if I am right?” I whispered to myself. “What a drama! What a peep into the unexplored corners of our souls!”
I went to the window. An early milk cart clattered along the thoroughfare with a figure nodding on its seat. When the mud-spattered white horse had reached a circle of light shed from the lamp on the street corner, the figure arose and, looking up at the stars in the rifts of the sky, pulled off and folded a rubber coat. The storm had blown away.
“He does a simple little act,” I said to myself as I watched the figure seat itself again. “His thoughts may be as simple. But the consequences of either! Who can say? Life itself is all on one side of a blue wall!”
Physicians, however, make good detectives. I mention this not to point out my own case particularly, but merely to call your attention to the fact that a good surgeon or practitioner has a training in those qualities of mind which produce a great solver of mysteries. A good physician must develop the powers of observation. In any physical disorder, knowing the cause, he must forecast the effect, or with the evidences of some effect before him, he must deduce the cause. Above all he must keep his mind from jumping at false conclusions, even though these conclusions are in line with all his former experiences. Physicians learn these principles by their mistakes in following clues. A good diagnostician has in him the material for an immortal police inspector. I speak modestly, and yet I must say that the next morning proved that I was not mistaken in these theories.
Before nine o’clock I had arrived at the Marburys’. The banker himself opened the door.
“Doctor!” he cried, his face drawn out of its mask of eternal shrewdness and suspicion by a beaming smile, “what can I say? How can we ever show our gratitude?”
“Not so fast!” I reproved him. “There is danger in too much optimism. The disease is treacherous.”
“But Miss Peters, the nurse—she sees it, too! There can be no doubt. Our little Virginia is saved! You have done it!”