Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/157

 rein. The doctor watched him uneasily, but did not venture to help him: When he had unfastened the rein, Anson lifted the weight a few inches, but dropped it again, and left it lying on the ground. As he got into the buggy he reeled slightly, and the doctor took a step forward. But he recovered himself without help, and when he was seated, he gathered up the reins and drove rapidly away. Dr. Morse stood looking after the black buggy top, as it disappeared in the darkness, and listening to the sound of the receding wheels.

"Who could have supposed that a quack had a conscience," he muttered, as he turned on his heel and walked back to the desolate little house.

Anson Bennett had gone down into a blackness of darkness infinitely more terrible than anything the good doctor conceived of.

One pleasant evening four days later, Dr. Morse sat in his office enjoying an hour of hard-earned leisure. The office was a plain, uninviting room, with oil-cloth on the floor, shabby old furniture, and an unsightly hole under the mantlepiece, where a stove-pipe did duty in winter time. But the doctor loved the place, and was never so comfortable as when sitting, as now, in his revolving-chair, surrounded by his well-worn books and dusty bottles, smoking the second half of a cigar. He smoked very slowly, waiting, after each whiff, to watch the blue incense curl and wind in a vanishing spiral.