* * * * *
In the first light of the morning the Ducharme woman, creeping from her room in the rear, caught sight of them. Mrs. Preston's head was lying on the doctor's arm, while he knelt beside the table, watching her pale face in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs. Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have passed a peaceful night. Her flabby fat face was sickly white, and she trembled as she opened the side door to the hot morning sun. She threw some small thing into the waste by the door; then looking around to see that she was not observed, she hurled with all her strength a long bottle toward the swamp across the fence. The bottle fell short of the swamp, but it sank among the reeds and the fleurs-de-lys of the margin. Then the woman closed the door softly.
CHAPTER XXIII
That morning Sommers returned to the city. Mrs. Preston had asked him to notify Dr. Leonard and Miss M'Gann, the only friends she had in Chicago, that the funeral would take place late in the afternoon. In the elevator of the Athenian Building, Sommers met Dr. Lindsay with Dr. Rupert, the oldest member of the office staff. The two men bowed and edged their backs toward Sommers. He was already being forgotten. When the elevator cage discharged its load on the top floor, Rupert, who was popularly held to be a genial man, lingered behind his colleague, and tried to say something to the young doctor.
"Private practice?" he asked sympathetically, "or will you try hospital work again?"
"I haven't thought anything about it," Sommers replied truthfully.
Rupert, a man of useful, mediocre ability, eyed the younger man with curiosity, thinking that doubtless he had private means; that it was a pity he and Lindsay had fallen out, for he was a good fellow and clever.
"Well—glad to see you. Drop in occasionally—if you stay in Chicago."
The last phrase stung Sommers. It seemed to take for granted that there could be nothing professionally to keep him in Chicago after the fiasco of his introduction. He would have to learn how much a man's future depended upon the opinion of men whose opinion he despised.
Dr. Leonard came out of his den, where he was filling a tooth. His spectacles were pushed up over his shaggy brows, and little particles of gold and of ground bone clung untidily to the folds of his crumpled linen jacket. His patients did not belong to the class that is exacting about small things.