Nor did Holmes smile once because the chicken burlesqued man:  his thought was too single for that yet.  It was long before he thought of the people who came in quietly to see him as anything but shadows, or wished for them to come again.  Lois, perhaps, was the most real thing in life then to him:  growing conscious, day by day, as he watched her, of his old life over the gulf.  Very slowly conscious:  with a weak groping to comprehend the sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then forgetting his old life, and the change, and the pity he felt for himself, in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his nurse with her interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while the sky without would thicken and gray and a few still flakes of snow would come drifting down to whiten the brown fields,—­with no chilly thought of winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more quiet.  Whatever honest, commonplace affection was in the man came out in a simple way to this Lois, who ruled his sick whims and crotchets in such a quiet, sturdy way.  Not because she had risked her life to save his; even when he understood that, he recalled it with an uneasy, heavy gratitude; but the drinks she made him, and the plot they laid to smuggle in some oysters in defiance of all rules, and the cheerful pock-marked face he never forgot.

Doctor Knowles came sometimes, but seldom:  never talked, when he did come:  late in the evening generally:  and then would punch his skin, and look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the mantel-shelf with a grunt that terrified Lois into the belief that the other doctor was a quack, and her patient was totally undone.  He would sit, grim enough, with his feet higher than his head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and leave them both thankful when he saw proper to go.

The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to pieces, and souls set right.  He had no faith in your slow, impalpable cures:  all reforms were to be accomplished by a wrench, from the abolition of slavery to the pulling of a tooth.

He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either:  the men were started in life from opposite poles:  and with all the real tenderness under his surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard to touch him with the sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown crippled and penniless upon the world, helpless, it might be, for life.  He would have been apt to tell you, savagely, that “he wrought for it.”

Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters.  Knowles could have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the role played by the Papal power in the progress of humanity,—­how jar it served as a stepping-stone, and the exact period when it became a wearisome clog.  The world was done with it now, utterly.  Its breath was only poisoned, with coming death.  So the homely live charity of these women, their work, which, no other hands were ready to take, jarred against his abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a matter.  Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in spite of the positive philosophers, you know.