“I?”
“Yes. Ah, the bathotic chilblain, of course! Has it broken?”
Her husband felt afraid behind his mask of casual indifference.
“I must have rasped the skin and got some dirt into the place,” he said. “A mere nothing. I have just put on this finger-stall. So you have heard that the De la Mottes are leaving, eh? They were not much good in the town, so far as the practice was concerned?”
Parker Steel’s reply to his wife’s question had flashed a suggestive gleam across his mind. Very probably it was too late for him to defend her against himself. And even if his fears proved true, he could swear absolute ignorance as to the presence of the disease. No guilt attached to him. He was merely striving to neutralize the effects of a damnable and undeserved misfortune.
CHAPTER XXVI
James Murchison, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the clock struck eight, finding in this stern routine a power to steady him against despair. He slipped off his overcoat, folded it slowly and methodically over the back of a bench, and hung his hat on one of the gas brackets projecting from the wall. To John Tugler, who was seated at one of the tables, examining a girl with a red rash covering her face, there was something in the big man’s slow and restrained patience that betrayed how sorrow was shadowing his assistant’s home.
John Tugler pushed back his chair, and crossed the room to the corner where Murchison was bending over his open instrument bag. The droop of the shoulders, the whole pose of the powerful figure, told of the burden that lay heavy upon the father’s heart.
“Murchison.”
The face that met John Tugler’s was haggard and stupid with two sleepless nights.