Unconsciously they drifted farther and farther into intimacy. Sommers talked as he thought, with question and protest, intolerant of conventions, of formulas. They forgot the diseased burden that lay in the chamber above, with its incessant claims, its daily problems. They forgot themselves, thus strangely brought together and revealed to each other, at one glance as it were, without the tiresome preliminary acquaintanceship of civilization. It had grown dark in the room before Sommers came back to the reality of an evening engagement.
"You can get a train on the railroad west of the avenue," Mrs. Preston suggested. "But won't you let me give you something to eat?"
"Not this time," Sommers answered, taking his hat "Perhaps when I come again—in a few days. I want to think—what can be done."
She did not urge him to stay. She was surprised at her boldness in suggesting it. He had assumed the impersonal, professional manner once more. That precious hour of free talk had been but an episode, a relaxation. He gave directions as he went to the door.
"The patient will sleep till to-morrow. It will take two or three days to get over this relapse."
Then he took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription.
"Should he grow unmanageable, you had better give him one of these powders—two, if necessary. But no more; they are pretty strong."
He placed the leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her—a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with rare beauty.
CHAPTER XII
The engagement was not one to be missed, at least by a young professional man who had his way to make, his patients to assemble, in the fierce struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid enough,—a lecture at the Carsons' by one of the innumerable lecturers to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage in their pilgrimage.