Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/151

 he, who should have been armed to the teeth, stood weaponless, helpless as a child. A shuffling sound at the door startled him, and then he heard a childish voice whimpering—"Muvver! Muvver! Let me in!"

He went and opened the door and said sternly: "Your mother isn't here. Go away," and the little figure turned and fled from the strange man, in whose set face the child had not recognized the doctor.

And still the mother did not return. She must have gone herself for Dr. Morse. Anson paced the room in growing anguish of spirit. It seemed like a horrible nightmare, and he flung his head back violently to wake himself. Yet he knew, with an insistent, grinding knowledge, that it was a nightmare from which there would be no awakening.

In after years when he looked back upon that day, one consolation remained to him in his shame and self-abasement. He had not carried on the pitiful farce a moment after it was revealed to him in its true light. Though his mind was not prompt to accept the bitter truth of his incompetency, a deeper consciousness of it was so borne in upon him, that he offered no remedy—gave no advice. From the moment when his finger touched the vanishing pulse, he ceased to act his miserable part. His feeble pleas for himself, his fretful accusations of others, were but surface disturbances.