I touched him on the shoulder, feeling nothing but the deepest commiseration for him, and he drew back from the bed. But still he could not rise and, relapsing into his violent desire for her, he grasped her stiffened hands as she shrieked again, quivering pitiably like a baffled mole dislodged from his safe tunnel. “The sores!” she howled. “Oh, oh, God! They’re all over me!” He stood up and perceiving that I was beside her and that she was free of him at last, my mother turned away from us and buried her head in the pillows, and there lay murmuring.

“What the devil is she saying?”

“She’s talking in Russian. She does that when she’s upset.”

“My God!” He strode in fury out the door and I followed him. “Well?”

“My mother has always been a little strange, Dr. Galbraith,” I said, “ever since my father went away. Even before that I guess.” He stood with his arms at the sides of his long gray tweed coat. He was staring bleakly at the barnyard scene above the table. “Dr. Galbraith,” I went on, “there is no way I can pay you. I’m very grateful, really.”

“I had never considered a fee. A doctor assumes responsibility for a patient without thinking of the money,” he said impatiently.

“I’m so sorry about it all, sir! You see, I think my mother is insane.”

It was the first time I had said the word aloud and it shocked me almost as much as it did him. He stared at me, absorbing the words after the sound was gone. “Insane?” he repeated. “Why, of course she is insane, but, I must confess, she hides her symptoms well. I swear, Miss Marburg, I had no proof of it until tonight.”

“What shall I do?” I asked him, for it was natural for me to appeal to him since he shared my knowledge. His expression changed from disgraced rage to anxiety. “Come to my office tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “and we’ll discuss it. She shouldn’t hear us, you know, in her excitable state. Tomorrow, promptly at four.” He hurried out, businesslike, professional, hiding beneath his manner the relief he must have felt in knowing that my mother had not “rejected” him since she was incapable of doing so.