It was following one of those good Saturday afternoons that she had taken ill. He had known immediately it was her appendix, and that there was plenty of time to take her to his own hospital.

“Are you going to remove it yourself?” she had asked, smiling despite her pain and nausea because it was so damn funny being one of his patients.

He shook his head. “Harrelmann. I’ll be there, Darling.” He didn’t ever want to operate on her. Not even an appendectomy.

In the hospital he had turned her over for the work-up to the young Puerto Rican intern named Samirez.

“My wife is allergic to penicillin,” he had said in case she forgot to mention it.

He had repeated it two more times before he had kissed her and hurried off to find Harrelmann. Later they had discovered that the boy knew almost no English at all. He hadn’t taken a case history from Frances because he could neither ask the questions nor understand the answers. Evidently the only word that had come through clearly was “penicillin,” and dutifully he had given her 400,000 units intramuscularly. Before Harland had even located Dr. Harrelmann, Frances had gone into anaphylactic shock and was dead.

Although his friends had tried to keep him away from the Mortality Conference, he had attended and had quietly insisted on the presence of an interpreter so that Dr. Samirez could understand every word. Under Harrelmann’s watchful, analytic eyes he had treated the boy with consideration and great control. But he had been mercilessly thorough. A month after the committee had declared the death preventable and Dr. Samirez had resigned his internship and returned to his island home, Dr. Harrelmann had invited Harland to lunch and had persuaded him to head the department upon his own retirement.

He had had to give up his private practice, but he never had regretted that. He broke as much as possible with the pattern of their former life. He had sold the farm the following autumn, passing up a profit of five thousand dollars from a Worcester accountant named Rosenfeld in order to sell to a lawyer from Framingham named Bancroft. Rosenfeld and his wife seemed like nice people and he never told any of his friends about their offer. He knew it was the kind of thing that would have made Frances furious at him and yet he couldn’t bear the thought of the farm she had loved being used for the pleasure of people who were so different from what she had been.

He shook his head and replaced the brandy bottle after a slight battle with himself.

He never had been much of a drinker, but lately he had developed a small enjoyable habit, fed by the rationalization that the alcoholic content of brandy was almost completely metabolized and therefore could be considered a form of self-prescription.

When the first symptoms had appeared he had suspected that his prostate was enlarged. He was 61, just the age when that became likely.