The wistful note had left his voice and the sorrowing smile his lips by the time we had entered the house. “I’ll just have a look-see at my patient,” he said heartily. “She is, ah, she’s valiantly combatting this pestiferous bug.” Because I knew as well as he did that the combat was over and that if she wished she could get up any time and resume a normal life, I looked away from him in embarrassment. He sensed it and he said, “The peril of this kind of thing is the relapse, you know. There’s the danger of tuberculosis.” The last word he said in a whisper, stretching up on tiptoe as if to carry the sound completely out of reach of my mother in the next room.

“Sonia!” came her voice. “Sonia, darling, is the doctor there? I coughed some blood up this afternoon.”

Dr. Galbraith’s face twisted in a faked consternation.

“I don’t believe it,” I said sulkily.

“Coming, Mrs. Morgan!” cried the doctor. “Oh, by the way, I forgot the bouquet I brought your mother. It’s still in the car. My garden is, so to speak, overflowing, and I thought I would like to share it with someone. I don’t know what it will be . . . my man just snipped a few things for me. Would you be so kind as to fetch them?” He went into the bedroom, leaving the door wide open. As I left the house I heard him say, “We’ll get the better of those darned old bugs yet and put some roses in your cheeks.”

I was out of the house for only a few minutes, but when I came back, I found the door closed although, because the lock was defective, it had fallen slightly ajar. I heard a conversation about my mother’s fancy-work. In her convalescence, she had begun to make fir trees, the decorative possibilities of which she had heretofore overlooked, and extraordinary birds which never pleased her. She would say, “I’ve left out something,” and puzzle over the creatures, turning her hoops now to one side and now to another and never seeing that each one of their plump behinds was destitute of tail feathers. But the doctor, blind with infatuation, assured her that they were beautiful, that she was a “regular ornithologist.”

“I like to see these homely virtues in a woman,” he was saying in a voice that had borrowed some of the nocturnal quality of my mother’s. “My own wife was a great hand at dressmaking. I still have some of her gowns in an old trunk in my attic.”

“Did she die or did she light out one fine day?” asked my mother.

Shocked by her expression, he did not immediately reply. “She died,” he said at last. “It makes one lonely.”

“Lonely! After my Hermann went away I used to cry myself to sleep every night of the world. But that was nothing to what it’s been like since little Ivan died.”