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“Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious,” I answered, with an effort to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. “People have been known to run for a plumber. But if you’re anxious, let us go and see what the matter is.”

I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.

“Don’t leave me,” he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to the sidewalk. “It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I should, like a murderer.”

“What rubbish!” I retorted. “You don’t know that anything has happened. You don’t know what the man’s gone for.”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Mrs. Bentley is–He’s gone for the doctor.”

As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again called something unintelligible to Glendenning.

We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we reached the Bentley place. The doctor’s buggy stood at the gate, and I perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also, which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me without, as if he had forgotten me.

I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see me, but he brought himself up short with an “Oh!” before he actually struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious the matter.

“Serious–yes,” he said. “Get in with me; I have to see another patient, but I’ll bring you back.” We mounted into his buggy, and he went on. “She’s in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn’t know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the heart, but I don’t think anything organic.”

“Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn’t it a frequent complication with asthma?”

“Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?”

“Mrs. Bentley. Isn’t Mrs. Bentley–“

“No!” shouted the doctor, in disgust, “Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever. It’s Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for her that there is for her mother.”

XIV.

I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home without the hope which Miss Bentley’s first rally had given the doctor. My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only that touch to make the tragedy complete.