Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/316

 He saw at once that Pentreath was fidgety and worried. He shook hands rather too eagerly, and his grip was uncertain and clammy. He stood in the middle of the room, looking with inattentive attention at the pictures and the furniture. His movements were jerky.

"Nice place you have here."

"I have been in hardly a month. How's Millchester?"

Pentreath sat down abruptly in a chair and after some desultory confidences he blurted out the very words that expressed all that Kit had seen in his eyes.

"Private practice is horribly worrying."

Kit had taken a chair by the table where the periodicals and magazines were arranged for waiting patients. He sat with his hands in his pockets.

"So is London. But I suppose one gets hard."

Pentreath winced.

"I can't get hard,—Sorrell. Sometimes I think I'm too soft. There are some cases;—I have one now."

"Let's hear about it."

The face of his old friend hurt him, for in Pentreath's eyes he found a suggestion of horrible cringing.

"A damnable case. I ought to have—had one of the other fellows in, but it was one of my chauffeur's children, and my wife"

For the moment Kit could not see how Mrs. Pentreath—the canon's daughter—came to intrude upon a problem in surgery, but later he was made to understand that Maurice's wife was a lady of many intrusions. Jerked out by Pentreath's sensitive and rather high-pitched voice, the description of the case appeared very simple. The chauffeur's eldest girl had fallen downstairs and hurt her wrist; Pentreath had been out at the time, and his wife had initiated one of her intrusions. She had applied a cold banda and sympathy. "When Dr. Pentreath comes back he will see to it."

Pentreath had examined the girl's wrist in the presence of his wife, another superfluous and indiscreet intrusion.

"Obviously, Sorrell, there seemed to be a fracture, a Colles. I suppose I ought to have had another opinion."

Listening in between the lines Kit seemed to catch a whisper of Pentreath's inveterate fearfulness. He suspected that Maurice was a little afraid of his wife. She happened