He looked at Philip eagerly while he read the prescriptions.  They were narcotics.  There were two of them, and one was a medicine which the Vicar explained he was to use only if his neuritis grew unendurable.

“I’m very careful,” he said.  “I don’t want to get into the opium habit.”

He did not mention his nephew’s affairs.  Philip fancied that it was by way of precaution, in case he asked for money, that his uncle kept dwelling on the financial calls upon him.  He had spent so much on the doctor and so much more on the chemist, while he was ill they had had to have a fire every day in his bed-room, and now on Sunday he needed a carriage to go to church in the evening as well as in the morning.  Philip felt angrily inclined to say he need not be afraid, he was not going to borrow from him, but he held his tongue.  It seemed to him that everything had left the old man now but two things, pleasure in his food and a grasping desire for money.  It was a hideous old age.

In the afternoon Dr. Wigram came, and after the visit Philip walked with him to the garden gate.

“How d’you think he is?” said Philip.

Dr. Wigram was more anxious not to do wrong than to do right, and he never hazarded a definite opinion if he could help it.  He had practised at Blackstable for five-and-thirty years.  He had the reputation of being very safe, and many of his patients thought it much better that a doctor should be safe than clever.  There was a new man at Blackstable—­he had been settled there for ten years, but they still looked upon him as an interloper—­and he was said to be very clever; but he had not much practice among the better people, because no one really knew anything about him.

“Oh, he’s as well as can be expected,” said Dr. Wigram in answer to Philip’s inquiry.

“Has he got anything seriously the matter with him?”

“Well, Philip, your uncle is no longer a young man,” said the doctor with a cautious little smile, which suggested that after all the Vicar of Blackstable was not an old man either.

“He seems to think his heart’s in a bad way.”

“I’m not satisfied with his heart,” hazarded the doctor, “I think he should be careful, very careful.”

On the tip of Philip’s tongue was the question:  how much longer can he live?  He was afraid it would shock.  In these matters a periphrase was demanded by the decorum of life, but, as he asked another question instead, it flashed through him that the doctor must be accustomed to the impatience of a sick man’s relatives.  He must see through their sympathetic expressions.  Philip, with a faint smile at his own hypocrisy, cast down his eyes.

“I suppose he’s in no immediate danger?”

This was the kind of question the doctor hated.  If you said a patient couldn’t live another month the family prepared itself for a bereavement, and if then the patient lived on they visited the medical attendant with the resentment they felt at having tormented themselves before it was necessary.  On the other hand, if you said the patient might live a year and he died in a week the family said you did not know your business.  They thought of all the affection they would have lavished on the defunct if they had known the end was so near.  Dr. Wigram made the gesture of washing his hands.