The Young Doctor, looking at her one day as she sat in a buggy while her
monster-man was inside the chemist's shop, said to himself:
"Sterilized! Absolutely, shamefully sterilized! But suppose she wakes up
suddenly out of that dream between life and death--what will happen?"
He remembered that curious, sudden, delicate catch of his palm on the day
when they first shook hands at the railway-station, and to him it was
like the flutter of life in a thing which seemed dead. How often he had
noticed it in man and animal on the verge of extinction! He had not
mistaken that fluttering appeal of her fingers. He was young enough to
translate it into flattering terms of emotion, but he did not do so. He
was fancy-free himself, and the time would come when he would do a
tremendous thing where a woman was concerned, a woman in something the
same position as this poor girl; but that shaking, thrilling thing was
still far off from him. For this child he only felt the healer's desire
to heal.
He was one of those men who never force an issue; he never put forward
the hands of the clock. He felt that sooner or later Louise Mazarine--he
did not yet know her Christian name--would command his help, as so many
had done in that prairie country, and not necessarily for relief of
physical pain or the curing of disease. He had helped as many men and
women mentally and morally as physically; the spirit of healing was
behind everything he did.
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