“Some one hold the mare. Why don’t you keep the kids in out of the wet? This way, doctor, the second tent.”
Mr. Carrington opened the flap, and, letting Murchison enter, contented himself with staring hard at two figures lying on an old flock mattress with a coat rolled up for a pillow. One was a woman, thin, still pretty, in a hollow-cheeked, hectic way, with a ragged blouse open at the throat, and a couple of sacks covering her. The other was a child, a girl with flaxen hair tossed about a flushed and feverish face. The child seemed asleep, with half an orange, sucked to the pulp, clutched by her grimy fingers.
Murchison remained for perhaps half an hour in that rain-soaked tent, while Mr. Carrington stumped up and down impatiently, kicking the mud from his boots and eying the rubbish that marked the presence of these London poor. The eastern sky was filling fast with the oblivion of night when Murchison emerged. The woman had been able to answer his questions in a dazed and apathetic way.
Mr. Carrington met him with a squaring of his sturdy shoulders and a bluff uplift of the chin.
“Well, doctor?”
“I’m glad you sent for me.”
“As bad as that, is it?”
“Typhoid, or I am much mistaken.”
The farmer thrust his hands into the side pockets of his mackintosh, and flapped them to and fro.
“Well, I’m damned!” was all he said.