The Swiss doctor nodded, magnetic eyes and mouth smiling.
"Meanwhile"—in his slow, careful speech—"meanwhile we do what we can to preserve the type which from long experience we know wears best."
Milton nodded. He moved to go, one hand on Gargoyle's unresponsive shoulder, when the office door swung open.
"Now this is real trouble," laughed a woman's fresh, deep-chested voice. "Doctor Mach, it means using one of your tall measuring-glasses or permitting these lovely things to wilt; some one has inundated us with flowers. I've already filled one bath-tub; I've even used the buckets in the operating-room."
The head nurse stood there, white-frocked, smiling, her stout arms full of rosy gladioli and the lavender and white of Japanese iris. The two doctors started to help her with the fragrant burden, but not before Gargoyle sprang out of his chair. With a start, as if shocked into galvanic motion, the boy sat upright. With a throttled cry he leaped at the surprised woman. He bore down upon her flowers as if they had been a life-preserver, snatching at them as if to prevent himself from being sucked under by some strange mental undertow. The softly-colored bloom might have had some vital magnetizing force for the child's blood, to which his whole feeble nature responded. Tearing the colored mass from the surprised nurse's arms, Gargoyle sank to the floor. He sat there caressing the flowers, smiling, making uncouth efforts to speak. The arms that raised him were gentle enough. They made no attempt to take from him his treasures. They sat him on the table, watching the little thin hands move ardently, yet with a curious deftness and delicacy, amid the sheaf of color. As the visionary eyes peered first into one golden-hearted lily, then into another, Milton felt stir, in spite of himself, Strang's old conviction of the "undressed mind." He said nothing, but stole a glance at the face of his superior. Doctor Mach was absorbed. He stood the boy on the table before him. The nurse stripped Gargoyle, then swiftly authoritative fingers traveled up and down the small, thin frame.
Life at Heartholm went on very much the same. The tender-hearted observer might have noted that the gardens held the same flowers year after year, all the perennials and hardy blooms John Strang had loved. No matter what had been his widow's courageous acceptance of modern stoicism, the prevailing idea that incurable grief is merely "morbid," yet, in their own apartments where their own love had been lived, was every mute image and eloquent trifle belonging to its broken arc. Here, with Strang's books on occult science, with other books of her own choosing, the wife lived secretly, unknown of any other human being, the long vigil of waiting for some sign or word from the spirit of one who by every token of religion and faith she could not believe dead—only to her wistful earthly gaze, hidden. She also hid in her heart one strangely persistent hope—namely, Gargoyle! Letters from Doctor Milton had been full of significance. The last letter triumphantly concluded:
Your young John Strang Berber, alias Gargoyle, can talk now, with only one drawback: as yet he doesn't know any words!
The rapidly aging mother at the gardener's cottage took worldly pride in what was happening to her youngest.
"I allus knowed he was smart," the woman insisted. "My Johnny! To think of him speaking his mind out like any one else! I allus took his part—I could ha' told 'em he had his own notions!"