Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/261



Gareth paced up and down the stuffy, narrow hallway of St. Paul's Hospital. The plaster was peeling from the white walls on which hung, each a little askew, a photograph of one of the founders, a man with a long white beard, a photograph of the Reverend Arthur Crandall, Rector of the Maple Valley Episcopal Church and President of the Board of Directors of the hospital, and a large photogravure of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, which Mrs. Townsend had brought back from a European tour and presented to the institution. The pungent odours of iodoform and ether married unpleasantly in Gareth's nostrils. In one of the bedrooms on the second storey his mother lay, waiting for Dr. Sinclair to perform the operation. From the moment the night before when his father had told him what was going to happen, he had known that his mother would die. Dr. Sinclair himself had been extremely dubious, but he had announced that her only hope lay in submitting to the knife. The predatory tumour must be removed, but the physician could not predict what effect the ether might have on her uncertain heart. Gareth could