Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/402

Rh anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.

She had known the sensation before—the transmuting of terror and pity into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge now—for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend them ﬁrmly to its service!

Wyant seconded her well, after a moment’s ague-ﬁt of fear. She pitied and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional self-command. Through the ﬁrst hours they worked shoulder to shoulder, conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with judgment.

The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, conﬁrmed his diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was pronounced—a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord.… [ 386 ]