"
Did this mean that he was about to take her into his confidence? All
her experience of him forbade her to believe it possible. But the
doubts and fears occasioned by her interview with her husband had
mastered her better sense; and the effort to conceal from the doctor
the anxiety under which she suffered was steadily weakening the
influence of her self-respect. "Why should I be alarmed?" she asked, in
the vain hope of encouraging him to tell the truth.
The doctor arrived at a hasty conclusion, on his side. Believing that
he had shaken her resolution, he no longer troubled himself to assume
the forms of politeness which he had hitherto, with some difficulty,
contrived to observe.
"In this curious little world of ours," he resumed, "we enjoy our lives
on infernally hard terms. We live on condition that we die. The man I
want to cure may die, in spite of the best I can do for him---he may
sink slowly, by what we medical men call a hard death. For example, it
wouldn't much surprise me if I found some difficulty in keeping him in
his bed. He might roam all over your cottage when my back was turned.
Or he might pay the debt of Nature--as somebody calls it--with
screaming and swearing.
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