She went into the doctor’s office and touched things with nervous hands; no patients tapping at the door; it seemed odd. She picked up a copy of The Scalpel and found herself reading what Doctor Edward H. Dixon had to say about subcutaneous fractures. And all the time enormous paws were pushing against the house. The hot sky crackled and crackled … but not mentioned by Sir William Fergusson in his “System of Practical Surgery” published, if memory serves correctly, in 1846. She could feel perspiration soaking out between her thin ribs, gluing her shirt to her body, and she wished that she might take off her corsets and lie down upon the bed with a cool cloth over her eyes. When she heard the carryall creaking to a halt outside, the room vanished in prickling grayness: she found her balance and her voice after Duffey came in and patted her hand …

No, she squawled, not out again! His eyes looked blank and startled. The girl, he said. I hate to be thinking of that fracture box, and maybe I can get her eased a trifle. If the horse was going to run away with her, he should have done it in December. After I’m through with Katie, I’ll drive out to Culps’.

His breath reeked of whiskey which was not agreeing with him, but his hands were steady as he repacked his satchels. Yes, he said, I looked after some soldiers but they took them away from me. And now she realized that indeed he was going into the streets again, and nothing she could say would keep him at home. She went to get a glass of milk for him, and a piece of sponge cake; he thanked her with dignity; after he was gone she saw the milk on his desk with only a finger of it missing, and the cake not touched at all.

She got her Bible out of the parlor. It was a dog-eared pile of thin leaves with the backbone gone, for she read it every day and at length. Her family had frowned upon her marriage to an Irishman, even one whose Catholicism was only a boyhood recollection, and had tacitly murmured that God might never forgive. She had not been inside a church for more than thirty years, except to attend funerals and church programs, but she could have told Reverend Solt a thing or two about the prophets. Gettysburg regarded her as a queer piece, but felt the primness of her faith as opposed to the doctor’s flagrant agnosticism.

It was Jeremiah, and she had read a chapter and more before she saw the terrible error of her selection.