“I’ve got—­such a pain down here in my side—­oh, it’s just—­it tears at me.”

“Bad indigestion?  Shall I get you some bicarb?”

“Don’t think—­that would help.  I felt funny last evening and yesterday, and then—­oh!—­it passed away and I got to sleep and—­That auto woke me up.”

Her voice was laboring like a ship in a storm.  He was alarmed.

“I better call the doctor.”

“No, no!  It’ll go away.  But maybe you might get me an ice-bag.”

He stalked to the bathroom for the ice-bag, down to the kitchen for ice.  He felt dramatic in this late-night expedition, but as he gouged the chunk of ice with the dagger-like pick he was cool, steady, mature; and the old friendliness was in his voice as he patted the ice-bag into place on her groin, rumbling, “There, there, that’ll be better now.”  He retired to bed, but he did not sleep.  He heard her groan again.  Instantly he was up, soothing her, “Still pretty bad, honey?”

“Yes, it just gripes me, and I can’t get to sleep.”

Her voice was faint.  He knew her dread of doctors’ verdicts and he did not inform her, but he creaked down-stairs, telephoned to Dr. Earl Patten, and waited, shivering, trying with fuzzy eyes to read a magazine, till he heard the doctor’s car.

The doctor was youngish and professionally breezy.  He came in as though it were sunny noontime.  “Well, George, little trouble, eh?  How is she now?” he said busily as, with tremendous and rather irritating cheerfulness, he tossed his coat on a chair and warmed his hands at a radiator.  He took charge of the house.  Babbitt felt ousted and unimportant as he followed the doctor up to the bedroom, and it was the doctor who chuckled, “Oh, just little stomach-ache” when Verona peeped through her door, begging, “What is it, Dad, what is it?”

To Mrs. Babbitt the doctor said with amiable belligerence, after his examination, “Kind of a bad old pain, eh?  I’ll give you something to make you sleep, and I think you’ll feel better in the morning.  I’ll come in right after breakfast.”  But to Babbitt, lying in wait in the lower hall, the doctor sighed, “I don’t like the feeling there in her belly.  There’s some rigidity and some inflammation.  She’s never had her appendix out has she?  Um.  Well, no use worrying.  I’ll be here first thing in the morning, and meantime she’ll get some rest.  I’ve given her a hypo.  Good night.”

Then was Babbitt caught up in the black tempest.

Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the spiritual dramas through which he had struggled became pallid and absurd before the ancient and overwhelming realities, the standard and traditional realities, of sickness and menacing death, the long night, and the thousand steadfast implications of married life.  He crept back to her.  As she drowsed away in the tropic languor of morphia, he sat on the edge of her bed, holding her hand, and for the first time in many weeks her hand abode trustfully in his.