It is the privilege of short-tempered women to wax testy under the touch of trouble, and Mrs. Baxter, her hard face querulous and unlovely, stood in the doorway of Boland’s Farm, watching the road for the flash of the doctor’s lamps. A couple of cypress-trees, dead and brown towards the house, built a deep porch above the door. Beyond the white palings of the garden the broad roof of a barn swept up against the sombre azure of the summer night; and the blackness of the byres and outhouses contrasted with the lawn that was lit by the lighted windows. To the west stood four great Lombardy poplars whose leaves made the night breeze seem restless about the house.

The austere figure of her sister joined itself to Mrs. Baxter’s under the cypresses. They talked together in undertones as they watched the road, their voices harsh and unmusical even in an attempted whisper. Mrs. Baxter and Miss Harriet Season were tall and sinewy women, narrow of face and mind, hard in eye and body, their sense of sex reduced to insignificance. The unfortunate Inglis, who sat pulling at his watch-chain beside Mr. Thomas Baxter’s bed, had found their hawk faces too keen and uncompromising for his self-esteem. They had scented out his incompetence as two old crows will scent out carrion.

“Drat the man, is he never coming!”

Mrs. Baxter smoothed her dress, and stood listening irritably, an angular and inelegant silhouette against the lamp-light.

“Just hear Tom groaning.”

“And that poor ninny sitting by the bed and trying to look wise. Ain’t that a light over the willows? I shall lose my temper if it ain’t Murchison.”

Miss Harriet tilted her head like an attentive parrot.

“I can hear the thing puffing.”

“Just keep quiet—can’t you?”

“Lor, Mary, you are peevish!”

“How can I listen with all your chattering?”

Murchison, depressed and out of heart, met these two ladies at the farm-house door. They greeted him with no relieved and hysterical profuseness. Mrs. Baxter extended a red-knuckled hand, looking like a woman ready to express a grievance.

“Glad you’ve come at last, doctor; we’ve been waiting long enough.”

They ushered Murchison into the parlor, a room that cultivated ugliness from the wool-work mantel-cover to the red and yellow rug before the door. Murchison, like most professional men, had become accustomed to the impertinent petulance of sundry middle-class patients. Unstrung and inwardly humiliated as he was that night, the austere woman’s tartness roused his impatience.

“My car broke down on the way. How is Mr. Baxter?” and he pulled off his gloves.

“Bad, sir, sorry to say. I can’t think, doctor, how you could send that young chap over here.”

“Dr. Inglis?”

“He don’t know his business; we hadn’t any faith in him from the minute he entered the door.”

“Dr. Inglis is perfectly competent to represent me when I am away from Roxton.”

“Indeed, doctor, I beg to differ.”

Mrs. Baxter’s grieved contempt suggested that Murchison had no Christian right to rest or eat when duty called him. Had the lady been less selfish and aggressive she might have been struck by the man’s tired eyes and nervous, irritable manner. But Mrs. Baxter was one of those crude and complacent people who never consider the sensitive complexities of others.

“I will see your husband at once.”

“I hope you’re not going to operate, doctor.”

Murchison’s face betrayed his irritation as he moved towards the door.

“My dear madam, do you wish me to attend your husband, or do you not?”

The bony woman tilted her chin.

“I don’t hold with people being cut about with knives.”

Ignorance when insolent is doubly exasperating, and Murchison was in no mood for an argument.

“Mrs. Baxter, from what Dr. Hicks has said, your husband will die unless operated on immediately.”

The farmer’s wife shrugged, and pressed her lips together.

“Very well, doctor, have your own way.”

“If I am to attend your husband you must trust in my opinion.”

“Oh—of course. Do what you think proper, sir. I know we don’t signify.”

Murchison abandoned Mrs. Baxter to her prejudices, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom, where Dr. Inglis dabbled scalpels and artery forceps in surgical trays. The assistant’s thin face welcomed his superior with a worried yet grateful smile. No heroine of romance had listened more eagerly for the sound of her lover’s gallop than had Dr. Inglis for the panting of Murchison’s car.

On the bed with its white chintz valance and side curtains lay the farmer, skin ashy, eyes sunken, the typical facies of acute abdominal obstruction. A sickly stench rose from a basin full of brown vomit beside the bed. The man hiccoughed and groaned as he breathed, each spasm of the diaphragm drawing a quivering gulp of pain.

Murchison, his eyes noting each significant detail, seated himself on the edge of the bed. He had hoped that Inglis might have been mistaken, and that he should find the case less grave than Dr. Hicks had suggested. Murchison dreaded the thought of an operation, even as a tired man dreads the duty he cannot justify. He felt unequal to the nerve strain that the ordeal demanded, for his hand was not the steady hand of the master for the night. Slowly and with the uttermost care he examined the man, realizing with each sign and symptom that Hicks’s diagnosis appeared too true. There was no escaping from the gravity of the crisis. Unless relieved, Thomas Baxter would surely die.

Murchison rose with a tired sigh, and pressing his eyes for a moment with the fingers of his right hand, went to the table where Inglis had been arranging the instruments and dressings.

“You have an?sthetics?”

“Yes. Are you going to operate?”

“Yes, I must. It is our only chance.”

“And the bed, it is a regular feather pit.”

“We have to put up with these things in the country. I have performed tracheotomy with a pair of scissors and a hair-pin.”

Inglis had faith enough in his chief’s resources. True, Murchison looked fagged and out of fettle, yet the theorist little suspected how greatly the elder man dreaded what was before him. Poor Porteus Carmagee’s port had worked havoc with that delicate marvel, the brain of the scientific age. Murchison had sustained a moral shock, and he was still tremulous with humiliation and remorse. One of the most trying ordeals of surgery lay before him, with every disadvantage to test his skill. A weaker man might have temporized, or played the traitor by surrendering to nature. Murchison’s conscience was too strong to suffer him to shirk his duty.

He crossed the room to the bed, and bent over the farmer.

“Mr. Baxter, you are very ill; we must give you chloroform.”

The man’s sunken eyes looked up pathetically into Murchison’s face.

“Oh, dear Lord, doctor, anything; I can’t stand the gripe of it much longer.”

“You understand that I am going to operate on you?”

“All right, sir, do just what you think proper.”

In a few minutes the instrument table, with a powerful electric surgical-lamp, had been brought near the bed. Murchison had taken off his coat, tied on an apron, and was soaking his hands in perchloride of mercury. Inglis had the chloroform mask over the farmer’s face. The man was weak with the anguish he had suffered, and took the an?sthetic without a struggle. Soon came the twitch............