I fell asleep for a little, and woke again.  My mother’s bed-chamber was next to mine.  I heard my aunt Chance’s heavy footsteps going to and fro in the room, and, suspecting something wrong, knocked at the door.  My mother’s pains had returned upon her; there was a serious necessity for relieving her sufferings as speedily as possible, I put on my clothes, and ran off, with the medicine bottle in my hand, to the other end of the village, where the doctor lived.  The church clock chimed the quarter to two on my birthday just as I reached his house.  One ring of the night bell brought him to his bedroom window to speak to me.  He told me to wait, and he would let me in at the surgery door.  I noticed, while I was waiting, that the night was wonderfully fair and warm for the time of year.  The old stone quarry where the carriage accident had happened was within view.  The moon in the clear heavens lit it up almost as bright as day.

In a minute or two the doctor let me into the surgery.  I closed the door, noticing that he had left his room very lightly clad.  He kindly pardoned my mother’s neglect of his directions, and set to work at once at compounding the medicine.  We were both intent on the bottle; he filling it, and I holding the light—­when we heard the surgery door suddenly opened from the street.

VIII

Who could possibly be up and about in our quiet village at the second hour of the morning?

The person who opened the door appeared within range of the light of the candle.  To complete our amazement, the person proved to be a woman!  She walked up to the counter, and standing side by side with me, lifted her veil.  At the moment when she showed her face, I heard the church clock strike two.  She was a stranger to me, and a stranger to the doctor.  She was also, beyond all comparison, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.

“I saw the light under the door,” she said.  “I want some medicine.”

She spoke quite composedly, as if there was nothing at all extraordinary in her being out in the village at two in the morning, and following me into the surgery to ask for medicine!  The doctor stared at her as if he suspected his own eyes of deceiving him.  “Who are you?” he asked.  “How do you come to be wandering about at this time in the morning?”

She paid no heed to his questions.  She only told him coolly what she wanted.  “I have got a bad toothache.  I want a bottle of laudanum.”

The doctor recovered himself when she asked for the laudanum.  He was on his own ground, you know, when it came to a matter of laudanum; and he spoke to her smartly enough this time.

“Oh, you have got the toothache, have you?  Let me look at the tooth.”

She shook her head, and laid a two-shilling piece on the counter.  “I won’t trouble you to look at the tooth,” she said.  “There is the money.  Let me have the laudanum, if you please.”