It was long, too, before he
thought of the people who came in quietly to see him as anything
but shadows, or wished for them to come again. Lois, perhaps,
was the most real thing in life then to him: growing conscious,
day by day, as he watched her, of his old life over the gulf.
Very slowly conscious: with a weak groping to comprehend the
sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then forgetting
his old life, and the change, and the pity he felt for himself,
in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his nurse with her
interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while the sky
without would thicken and gray, and a few still flakes of snow
would come drifting down to whiten the brown fields,--with no
chilly thought of winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more
quiet. Whatever honest, commonplace affection was in the man
came out in a simple way to this Lois, who ruled his sick whims
and crotchets in such a quiet, sturdy fashion. Not because she
had risked her life to save his; even when he understood that, he
recalled it with an uneasy, heavy gratitude; but the drinks she
made him, and the plot they laid to smuggle in some oysters in
defiance of all rules, and the cheerful, pock-marked face, he
never forgot.
Doctor Knowles came sometimes, but seldom: never talked, when he
did come: late in the evening generally: and then would punch his
skin, and look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the
mantel-shelf with a grunt that terrified Lois into the belief
that the other doctor was a quack, and her patient was totally
undone.
Pages:
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158