Adela Cathcart, Volume 3 eBook

Every one present perfectly understood this; and however, in other circumstances, the colonel might have resented the tone of authority with which Harry spoke, he was compelled, for his daughter’s sake, to yield; and he afterwards justified Harry entirely.  Mrs. Cathcart walked out of the room with her neck invisible from behind.  The colonel sat down by the fire.  Harry wrote his prescription on the half sheet from which Dr. Wade had torn his; and then saying that he would call in the evening, took his leave of the colonel, and bowed to his patient, receiving a glance of acknowledgment which could not fail to generate the feeling that there was a secret understanding between them, and that he had done just what she wanted.  He mounted his roan horse, called Rhubarb, with a certain elation of being, which he tried to hide from everyone but himself.

When doctors forget that their patients are more like musical instruments than machines, they will soon need to be reminded that they are men and women, and not dogs or horses.  Yet, alas for the poor dogs and horses that fall into the hands of a man without a human sympathy even with them!  I, John Smith, bless you, my doctor-friends, that ye are not doctors merely, but good and loving men; and, in virtue thereof, so much the more—­so exceedingly the more Therapeutae.

I need not follow the course of the fever.  Each day the arrival of the cold fit was longer delayed, and the violence of both diminished, until they disappeared altogether.  But a day or two before this happy result was completed, Adela had been allowed to go down to the drawing-room, and had delighted her father with her cheerfulness and hopefulness.  It really seemed as if the ague had carried off the last remnants of the illness under which she had been so long labouring.  But then, you can never put anything to the experimentum crucis; and there were other causes at work for Adela’s cure, which were perhaps more powerful than even the ague.  However this may have been, she got almost quite well in a very short space of time; and with her father’s consent, issued invitations to another meeting of the story-club.  They were at once satisfactorily responded to.

CHAPTER V.

PERCY.

By this time Percy had returned to London.  His mother remained; but the terms understood between her niece and herself were those of icy politeness and reserve.  I learned afterwards that something of an understanding had also been arrived at between Percy and Harry; ever since learning the particulars of which, I have liked the young rascal a great deal better.  So I will trouble my reader to take an interest in my report of the affair.

Percy met Harry at the gate, after one of his professional visits, and accosted him thus: 

“Mr. Armstrong, my mother says you have been rude to her.”

“I am not in the least aware of it, Mr. Percy.”