Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/31

Rh passing upset of the stomach. He felt himself, nevertheless, obliged to put all manner of medical questions to the young lady, and was surprised by the extraordinarily unembarrassed way in which she recounted and elucidated certain processes of nature with an ingenuousness he was quite unaccustomed to in young ladies; and while he listened, he asked himself casually whether she would have expressed herself with as little hesitation in the presence of a younger physician. He would have taken her to be hardly less than twenty-five, had it not been for the calmness of the look in her large eyes, which somehow gave her an expression of greater maturity. In the braids of her blond hair, which she did up well towards the top of her head, she wore a plain silver comb. She was dressed simply, but in a thoroughly provincial style; her white girdle was fastened with a decorative gilt buckle. What impressed the doctor most, nay, even seemed to him somehow suspicious, were the very elegant light-brown buckskin half-shoes, which in colour exactly matched her stockings.

But she had not yet completed her report, nor the doctor his observations, when from the interior of the house someone called "Sabine." The doctor rose and the young woman showed the way through the ample, already half-dark dining-room and into the lighter apartment adjoining; here he saw the ailing parent, in a white bed-jacket and a white cap, sitting upright in one of the two beds. As he entered, she greeted him with a somewhat astonished, but rather alert and almost merry look.

"Doctor Graesler," Sabine introduced him, and then walked quickly to the head of the bed and felt tenderly of her mother's forehead. The latter, who appeared well-nourished, pleasant, and far from old, shook her head disapprovingly.

"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Doctor," she said, "but why, my dear child—"

"It really seems to me," remarked the doctor as he took the hand his patient held out to him and at the same time felt her pulse, "that I am by way of being rather superfluous here, the more so as your daughter"—and here he smiled politely—"would appear to have at her command a simply amazing knowledge of medicine. But as long as I have come all this way, you know—"

And while the lady seemed with a shrug of her shoulders to be resigning herself to her fate, he undertook a more detailed examination, followed attentively by Sabine's calm eyes. When he had