“It was yesterday it began,” she answered submissively.
“Pains!”
“Yes; but not more than I’ve often had at home. I believe Dr. Ansell is an alarmist.”
“You ought not to have travelled alone,” he said, to himself more than to her.
“As if that had anything to do with it!” she answered quickly.
They were silent for a while.
“Now go and have your dinner,” she said. “You must be hungry.”
“Have you had yours?”
“Yes; a beautiful sole I had. Annie is good to me.”
They talked a little while, then he went downstairs. He was very white and strained. Newton sat in miserable sympathy.
After dinner he went into the scullery to help Annie to wash up. The little maid had gone on an errand.
“Is it really a tumour?” he asked.
Annie began to cry again.
“The pain she had yesterday—I never saw anybody suffer like it!” she cried. “Leonard ran like a madman for Dr. Ansell, and when she’d got to bed she said to me: ‘Annie, look at this lump on my side. I wonder what it is?’ And there I looked, and I thought I should have dropped. Paul, as true as I’m here, it’s a lump as big as my double fist. I said: ‘Good gracious, mother, whenever did that come?’ ‘Why, child,’ she said, ‘it’s been there a long time.’ I thought I should have died, our Paul, I did. She’s been having these pains for months at home, and nobody looking after her.”
The tears came to his eyes, then dried suddenly.
“But she’s been attending the doctor in Nottingham—and she never told me,” he said.
“If I’d have been at home,” said Annie, “I should have seen for myself.”
He felt like a man walking in unrealities. In the afternoon he went to see the doctor. The latter was a shrewd, lovable man.
“But what is it?” he said.
The doctor looked at the young man, then knitted his fingers.
“It may be a large tumour which has formed in the membrane,” he said slowly, “and which we may be able to make go away.”
