Then there came a new doctor to see Jenny.  He was a very clever specialist from a distant town; but for him the business of death had not yet obscured its tragedy,—­though words like “tragedy” were not often on his tongue.  Consumption was a strong enough word for him.

His heart went out to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it ached for that young man downstairs.  It was more than a professional contempt for the “general practitioner” that made him silently curse what he called the “death-doctor,” as he looked at Jenny, “Jack of all diseases, and master of none.”

“Two months ago, a month,” he thought, as he listened and listened for a sound of hope that might come to his ear through Jenny’s wasted side,—­“even a month, and I could have saved her.”  And yet as he talked to her he was not so sure, after all.  He missed something in her voice.  It was the will to live.

“Have you had a shock at any time?” he said.

Jenny was taken by surprise for a moment,—­the other doctor had asked her that, too,—­and she did not deny it so convincingly as she tried to.

“O, that’s all right,” said the doctor aloud to Jenny and her mother, who stood by, though inwardly he said, “I see.  That’s the reason;” and again he said, “I’m afraid you mustn’t get up just yet.  That chest of yours has to be taken care of, but you needn’t be anxious.  In a month or six weeks you’ll be all right again.”

“Only a month or six weeks,” said Jenny, with a sinking voice.  She meant—­was that all that was left to her of life and love?

Downstairs Theophil stood waiting with a beating heart.  He sprang to the door and drew the doctor into his room.  The doctor laid a kind hand upon his arm, and there was a look in his face that made Theophil’s heart die within him.

“You mean she is going to die?” he said with fearful calmness. “You mean that?”

“My poor fellow, God knows what I would give to deny it.”

“She—­is—­going—­to—­die—­to die! It is impossible!  Not Jenny!” and between that exclamation and his first stunned cry it seemed as though bells had been tolling a thousand years.  It seemed as though he had been sitting there as in a cave since the beginning of time, saying over and over to himself, “Jenny is going to die.”

There was a decanter on the sideboard.  The doctor poured some spirit into a glass.  “Drink this,” he said.  Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again.  Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all.  At all events, the spirit gave him nerve, which else he could not have found, to go and sit by Jenny once more.  It helped him even to be gay, so that Jenny said to herself, “The doctor has not told him that I am going to die.”