It was a joy to watch the response. He could see weariness and discouragement slipping from her as she spoke.
He was thinking to himself that she was superb, but aloud he said, "This is a good specimen in here. If you'll just come into the next room I'd like to go over it with you. I think I can make a few things clear."
She was radiant then, happy that he had so soon forgotten her first failure, appreciating his assumption that she was ready even now to go on with the fight.
"She will carry it through," thought Dr. Parkman, as he finally left the hospital. "And, by the good Lord, I believe that Karl Hubers is going to get back in the game and win! Nasty blow to the woman haters," he mused, as he looked in upon an office full of waiting patients,—"a very nasty blow."
CHAPTER XXVIII
WITH BROKEN SWORD
He wished that Ernestine would come home. He had let Ross go at four, and it was lonesome there alone. In spite of the fact that she was away so much, Ernestine was almost always there when he wanted her most. That was just one of the wonderful things about Ernestine. Something must have detained her to-day.
He reached over on the table for his copy of "Faust." It had become his habit to pick it up when he did not care to sit face to face with his own thoughts. It seemed to hold some word for everything in life. Its universality made it a good friend.
It was becoming easier to read with his fingers, but he had never come into the old joy in reading that there had been in the days when he could see it. And it seemed to him that there was an unnecessary clumsiness about the whole thing. He had worked out a little idea of his own for which he was going to have a model made. He believed it might help some—at any rate he had enjoyed working it out. "If a fellow feels like inventing, he simply must invent something, whether it amounts to anything or not," he had explained to Ernestine.
He did not read consecutively to-night, but just a line here and there, getting a little of wit, a little of philosophy, a dash or two of sarcasm, an occasional gleam of sentiment; he liked to take it that way at times like this; it seemed if not one thing, then surely another, must keep him from the things into which it would be so easy to slip to-night.