Page:Twilight.djvu/179

 "You'll send for me to come back directly you are ill?"

"Very likely. That only means I like your drugs better than you."

He seized her hand, her waist, not for the first time, swore that he would kill himself if she despised and flouted him. Probably she liked the scenes he made her, for she often provoked them. They were mere rough animal scenes, acutely different from those she was able to bring about with Gabriel. But she did not do the only obvious and correct thing, which was to dismiss him and find another doctor.

In these strange days, waiting for her freedom, seeing Gabriel Stanton from Saturday to Monday and only Peter Kennedy all the long intervening week, she may have liked the excitement of being attended by a doctor who was madly in love with her. She excused herself to me on the ground that she was a novelist and he a strange and primitive creature of whom she was making a study. Also, curiously enough, he was genuinely musical. Something of an executant and an enthralled listener.

He himself suggested more than once that she should have other advice about her heart and he brought his partner to see her. But never repeated the experiment. Dr. Lansdowne purred and prodded her, talking all the time he used his stethoscope, smiling between whiles in a superior way as if he knew everything. Particularly when she tried