The House of Mystery | Page 3

They brought the same glorified thrill of contrast as this soft but strong
contralto voice proceeding from that delicate blondness.
"Oh, no!" she said, "I never saw her before. She was swaying as I came
down the aisle, and I caught her. She's--she's awake." The old woman
had stirred again.
"Get my bag from seat 12, parlor-car," said Dr. Blake to the porter.
"Tell them outside that it is a simple fainting-spell and we shall need no
assistance." Now his charity patient had recovered voice; she was
moaning and whimpering. The girl, obeying again Dr. Blake's
unspoken thought, took a quick step toward the door. He understood
without further word from her.
"All right," he said; "she may want to discuss symptoms. You're on the
way to the dining-car aren't you? I'll be along in five minutes, and I'll
let you know how she is. Tell them outside that it is nothing serious and
have the porter stand by--please." That last word of politeness came out
on an afterthought--he had been addressing her in the capacity of a
trained nurse. He recognized this with confusion, and he apologized by
a smile which illuminated his rather heavy, dark face. She answered
with the ghost of a smile--it moved her eyes rather than her mouth--and
the door closed.
After five minutes of perfunctory examination and courteous attention
to symptoms, he tore himself away from his patient upon the pretext
that she needed quiet. He wasted three more golden minutes in assuring
his fellow passengers that it was nothing. He escaped to the dining car,
to find that the delay had favored him. Her honey-colored back hair
gleamed from one of the narrow tables to left of the aisle. The
unconsidered man opposite her had just laid a bill on the waiter's check,
and dipped his hands in the fingerbowl. Dr. Blake invented a short
colloquy with the conductor and slipped up just as the waiter returned

with the change. He bent over the girl.
"I have to report," said he, "that the patient is doing nicely; doctor and
nurse are both discharged!"
She returned a grave smile and answered conventionally, "I am very
glad."
At that precise moment, the man across the table, as though
recognizing friendship or familiarity between these two, pocketed his
change and rose. Feeling that he was doing the thing awkwardly, that
he would give a year for a light word to cover up his boldness, Dr.
Blake took the seat. He looked slowly up as he settled himself, and he
could feel the heat of a blush on his temples. He perceived--and for a
moment it did not reassure him--that she on her part neither blushed nor
bristled. Her skin kept its transparent whiteness, and her eyes looked
into his with intent gravity. Indeed, he felt through her whole attitude
the perfect frankness of good breeding--a frankness which discouraged
familiarity while accepting with human simplicity an accidental contact
of the highway. She was the better gentleman of the two. His renewed
confusion set him to talking fast.
"If it weren't that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice, I
should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct.
You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss."
"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all
the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to
do. How is she? What was the matter?"
"She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment
from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at
Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at Boston
by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little
sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the
generations, I observe--though I'm a young physician at that!"
Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into

confusion.
"I don't know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham."
Dr. Blake drew out a card.
"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of
Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these
United States!"
"The Philippines--oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the
Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn't think we'd all be
talking of them so soon--"
"Oh, you've been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and
Nikko and--"
"No, only India."
"I've never been there--and I've heard it's the kernel of the East," he
said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding
a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern
nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather
cosmopolitan--he had dimly