It was fortunate for Mary Grey that the distance was not long, for, like Jehu the son of Nimshi, Yabel McQuhirr drave furiously. But at the bend of the highway called the Far-away Turn, just at the point at which the road dives down under a tangle of birch and alder, the old white mare was pulled suddenly up. For there was Dr. Brydson, riding cautiously on his little round-barrelled sheltie, his saddle-bags in front of him, and a silver-headed Malacca cane held in his hand like a riding-whip.
It was no long time before the good old doctor was raising the lax head of Yabel McQuhirr's wife. The strange distant smile was still in her eyes, and the left corner of her mouth twitched.
"She has had a shock," said Dr. Brydson, slowly, when Yabel and he had withdrawn a little. He was pulling his chin meditatively, and not thinking much of the husband.
"A stroke!" said Yabel, and the tone of his voice was so strange and terrible that the doctor turned quickly—"but not unto death! You can cure her—surely you can cure her?"
And he caught the doctor by the arm and shook it vehemently.
"Take your hands away, sir, and calm yourself!" said the physician. "If I am to do anything, we must have none of this."
"Say that she will not die!" he cried. And the deep-set angry eyes flamed down upon the physician, the great fists of iron were clenched.
Dr. Brydson was a little man, but a long course of being deferred to had given him great local dignity.
"I will say nothing of the kind, sir," he retorted. "I will do what I can; but this thing is the visitation of God, and human skill avails but little. Stand away from my patient, sir."
But at that moment a sudden and wondrous change passed over the face of Yabel McQuhirr. The physician was startled. It was like an earthquake rifting and changing a landscape while one looks. In the twinkling of an eye the fashion of Yabel's countenance was altered. He would have wept, yet stood gasping like one who knows not the way to weep. Instead he uttered a hoarse and terrible cry, and flung himself upon his knees by the bed.