The doctor nodded briefly. “Very sure, and the quicker the better!”
Donaldson gripped the back of the chair beside him till his knuckles showed white.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” the doctor spoke a trifle contemptuously. “Appendicitis is quite commonplace. We operate for it as many as a hundred times a year at the hospital.”
Donaldson rose slowly to his feet.
“I’ll let you know sometime soon,” he said, staring about him vaguely.
“All right. But I’d advise you to have it done quickly.”
Donaldson shuffled toward the door.
“I’ll let you know,” he murmured, and went out.
He descended to the street. He was a man of average height, and rather thin. He was dressed respectably in clothes of a few years back, but still good. One felt that he was careful of them, timidly careful. His blue eyes wandered in odd moments from one object to another, and his thin lips tried to maintain a firm line, but drooped weakly, if, perchance, he forgot. Then he twitched them up, reining them hard, trying to appear casual, indifferent. But his step would drop into its habitual short uncertainty, his shoulders slump down a bit, his eyes begin their covert roving, his whole figure expressing a desire to occupy as small a space as possible, as though his soul and body were squeezed in with a wish to be inconspicuous.
As he emerged from the doctor’s office, his pale eyes shifted as he gazed at the moving throng on the street. Why couldn’t it have been some one else? Here they were, all so gay, so unconscious of him and the shadow that hung over him. Unconscious! That was the word which had so terrified his mind for ten long years. And that was what the anesthetic meant—unconsciousness!