"Ah!" she said.
The exclamation was like something between a sigh and a sob. Immediately after she had uttered it she cleared her throat.
"I told Doctor Isaacson his coming here to-day was absolutely useless," began Doctor Hartley. "I told him no consultation was required. I begged him to leave the case in my hands. Over and over again I—"
"Oh, you don't know Doctor Isaacson if you think that a courteous request will have any effect upon him. If he wants to be in a thing, he will be in it, and nothing in heaven or earth will stop him. You forget his nationality."
She yawned again, and moved her shoulders.
"You are wronging me grossly, and you know it!" Isaacson said, in a very low voice.
He had laid his hat down on a little straw table. Now he took it up. What was the good of staying? How could a decent man stay? And yet the struggle within him was bitter. If he could only have been certain of this man Hartley, perhaps there would have been no struggle. He might have gone with an almost quiet heart. Or if he had been certain of something else, absolutely certain, he might have remained and acted, completely careless in his defiance of the woman who hated him. But though his instinct was alive, telling him things, whispering, whispering all the time; even though his observation had on the previous night begun to back up his instinct, saying, "Yes, you must be right! You are right!" yet he actually knew nothing. He knew nothing except that this young man, between whose hands lay Nigel's life, was under the spell of Mrs. Armine.
He took up his hat and held it tightly, crushing the soft brim between his fingers. Doctor Hartley was looking at him with the undisguised enmity of the egoist tricked. He had had time to find out that Isaacson had begun subtly to induce him to do what he had refused to do. If Mrs. Armine had not appeared unexpectedly, Nigel Armine's case would have been, perhaps, pretty thoroughly discussed by the two doctors.
"Pushing trickster!"
His round eyes said that with all the vindictiveness of injured conceit.