"May I go upstairs to Mistress?" Jack asked humbly. "I've said my prayers, sir, and I've had a good cry—and my head's easier now."
Mr. Keller spoke to him more gently than usual. "You had better not disturb your mistress before the doctor comes."
"May I wait outside her door, sir? I promise to be very quiet."
Mr. Keller consented by a sign. Jack took off his shoes, and noiselessly ascended the stairs. Before he reached the first landing, he turned and looked back into the hall. "Mind this!" he announced very earnestly; "I say she won't die—I say that!"
He went on up the stairs. For the first time Mr. Keller began to pity the harmless little man whom he had hitherto disliked. "Poor wretch!" he said to himself, as he paced up and down the hall, "what will become of him, if she does die?"
In ten minutes more, Doctor Dormann arrived at the house.
His face showed that he thought badly of the case, as soon as he looked at Mrs. Wagner. He examined her, and made all the necessary inquiries, with the unremitting attention to details which was part of his professional character. One of his questions could only be answered generally. Having declared his opinion that the malady was paralysis, and that some of the symptoms were far from being common in his medical experience, he inquired if Mrs. Wagner had suffered from any previous attack of the disease. Mr. Keller could only reply that he had known her from the time of her marriage, and that he had never (in the course of a long and intimate correspondence with her husband) heard of her having suffered from serious illness of any kind. Doctor Dormann looked at his patient narrowly, and looked back again at Mr. Keller with unconcealed surprise.
"At her age," he said, "I have never seen any first attack of paralysis so complicated and so serious as this."
"Is there danger?" Mr. Keller asked in a whisper.
"She is not an old woman," the doctor answered; "there is always hope. The practice in these cases generally is to bleed. In this case, the surface of the body is cold; the heart's action is feeble—I don't like to try bleeding, if I can possibly avoid it."