In the Border Country | Page 9

him, and again he looked long at her.
"What is that that you are trying to do?" he asked her at last. "Think carefully and tell me in one sentence."
"I have already thought carefully," she said, "and I can tell you. I am trying to live my husband's life, which I ought not to give up, my children's life, which I must not give up, and my own life, which I cannot give up."
He looked even longer than before at her and the late sun slipped down the polished fittings of his desk and down the gilded covers of the book-filled shelves behind him. Longer than before he looked and the lines deepened in his face and his eyes seemed to grow deeper in his head as she looked back at him. At last he spoke.
"My child," he said, "if I were a poor and hungry doctor it is not to be doubted that I should give you something in a bottle and tell you to come to me again. But I am a wealthy physician and I can afford to tell you truth. I can do nothing for you. You must cure yourself, or fail to do it so completely that I shall be needed to enable you to fail again. When you have repeated this last process sufficiently, I shall no longer be thus enabled and you will die. That is all."
"Die?" said she; "I shall die?"
"You will die," he said, "with everything that the world calls good fortune in your lap. With no excuse for doing so, but with every reason to be glad that you are doing so. Leaving behind you someone who needed you and more whom you needed. Now go home and think, and before you go, drink this."
Silently he poured out for her a tiny glassful of some colourless, aromatic liquid and in silence she drank it and left the room, where the dying sun glinted upon the gilded books. It seemed to her that he touched a bell on the desk with his hand, and though the cordial had already begun to affect her head strangely, she was able to observe that it was in answer to this bell that his office nurse appeared at the door as she reached it and put a steadying arm behind her.
"Come this way," said the nurse, "and sit a moment; do you feel a little dizzy?"
"A little," she answered, and her voice seemed to come from far away; "I am afraid that drink was stronger than it should have been ... if I could sit down ... the doctor...."
She knew that the nurse was helping her to a couch in a tiny room she had never been in before; she knew that she sank upon it and that the nurse settled her upon a bright crimson cushion; she heard her soothing murmur and nodded to show that she was not alarmed, only vexed at her own weakness, and then she ceased to struggle with the overwhelming drowsiness that oppressed her, and slept.
When she woke it was dark in the room. In the street the electric lights glowed, and the people passed steadily by the window; was it midnight, she wondered, or only early dusk? How strange that the doctor and the nurse had forgotten her!
"But, of course he would not have wished me waked," she said, and rose, straightened her dress, waited a moment, and then pulled impatiently at an old-fashioned bell-rope that hung by the door. There was no answer. Again she rang, but the house lay dark and silent. A little housemaid with brown, startled eyes, came at last, just as she was beginning to grow alarmed at the darkness and stillness, and stared at her.
"Was it you that rang, madam?" asked this little housemaid; "the doctor is out: he will not be back to-night."
"And the nurse?" she inquired, vexed at this lack of thought of her.
"The nurse has gone long ago, madam, for the night."
A flood of nervous anger broke over her.
"How disgraceful!" she cried; "how unkind! To leave me here like this! What time is it, pray?"
"It is very late, madam; I could not tell you the hour."
The little housemaid yawned and pressed her tumbled cap straight.
She bit her lips to keep herself from angry tears and rushed through the heavy street door, down the stone steps, out upon the pavement. Angrily she sped along, brushing by the people, who, in turn, stumbled rudely against her. The jostling crowd brimmed her eyes; she walked as one in a mist.
"How cruel everyone is to me!" she whispered to herself and walked faster. Suddenly a thought came to her. Where was she going? Surely she ought not to attempt to walk all the way to her home, so late at night? She must call