It had not been easy to gain an audience with Dr. McAllister, who was a house-physician and not allowed to have private cases, and so I had written him a note, saying that Miss Pride had asked me to look him up. He had sent back the reply that he would be delighted to meet me at such-and-such an hour on Sunday afternoon at a tea-room in Marblehead. It was the hasty note of a busy man who, aware of his duty towards his friends, parcels out his leisure time with no sign of the irritation he feels that he can keep no part of his life to himself. I would have let the matter rest there had I not, on returning to my mother, found her up and dressed, carrying a basket on her arm with the intention, I was afraid, of going to the village. I had urged her to go back to bed, but my entreaties were futile for she understood nothing but Russian. I had then given her a glass of brandy (she had at least not forgotten brandy) in which I had dissolved one of the sleeping powders left over from her illness. I must say here that this ingenious trick afforded me the only amusement I had in ten days. I could not help smiling, as I pulverized the pill, at the grave necessity that had driven me to practical joking, and when she began to droop, after no more than a quarter of an hour, I laughed outright. I had then locked her in and run back to the hospital where, on a sheet torn from my loose-leaf notebook, I wrote Dr. McAllister that I had an urgent message for him from Miss Pride. A cold, dubious answer came back at once saying that he would see me in his office in a few minutes.

The doctor had been reading. When I came in, he took off his horn-rimmed spectacles, uncovering eyes which were a blue resembling the flame from certain kinds of wood or oil, a color simultaneously fierce and smoky. In his face there was a union of austerity and simplicity, coming partly from its actual architecture: the defined planes of the jaw and cheek and forehead, the thin lips, the narrow nose, and partly from his expression as he intelligently and nobly appraised me, trying to adjust me to my note.

“You have a message for me?” he said, smiling and motioning me toward a chair. “You must be a friend of Miss Pride’s.”

“I am, in a way,” I said. “But I am really here under false pretenses, for I have no message for you. I had to see you. It’s about my mother.”

“I don’t have a private practice,” he said. “Our head, Dr. Galbraith, recently died, as perhaps you know, and his place has not yet been filled. But Dr. Roberts is in town, I’m quite sure.” As though to clinch his dismissal, he withdrew his spectacles from the pocket of his white coat and opened them.