"She shall want no defences while she is in my hospital."
"It is very well to say; but if you let her in there, you cannot help it. She must be in danger, of all sorts of harm."
"If you will prevent it, Mrs. Sandford, you will lay me under obligations," said the doctor, sitting down and looking up at his sister-in-law somewhat comically. "I am helpless, for I have passed my word. Daisy has the command."
"But just look at the figure she is, in that dress! Fancy it!
That is Miss Randolph."
The doctor glanced up and down, over my dress, and his eye turned to Mrs. Sandford with provoking unconcern.
"But you will not let her stay there, Grant?"
The doctor looked up at me now, and I saw an answer ready on his lips. There was but one way left for me, I thought; I do not know how I came to do it, but I was not Daisy that morning; or else my energies were all strung up to a state of tension that made Daisy a different person from her wont. I laid my hand lightly over the doctor's mouth before he could speak. It silenced him, as I hoped. He rose up with a look that showed me I had conquered, and asked if I were ready. He must go, he said.
I did not keep him waiting. And once out in the street, with my hand on his arm, I was quite Daisy again; as humble and quiet as ever in my life. I went like a child now, in my guardian's hand; through the little crowds of men collected here and there, past the sentinels at the hospital door, in through the wide, clean, quiet halls and rooms, where Dr. Sandford's authority and system made everything work, I afterwards found, as by the perfection of machinery. Through one ward and another at last, where the rows of beds, each containing its special sufferer, the rows of faces, of various expression, that watched us from the beds, the attendants and nurses and the work that was going on by their hands, caused me to draw a little closer to the arm on which I leaned and to feel yet more like a weak child. Yet even then, even at that moment, the woman within me began to rise and put down the feeling of childish weakness. I began to be strong.
Out of the wards, into his own particular room and office, comfortable enough, Dr. Sandford brought me then. He gave me a chair, and poured me out a glass of wine.
"No, thank you," said I, smiling. "I do not need it."