“I’m sure I will not need a physician,” I said, trying to speak distinctly, although it was an effort for me to articulate.  “Wait until Dicky comes, anyway.”

For distinct in my mind was a mental picture of the look I had detected in Dr. Pettit’s eyes upon the day of his last visit to my mother-in-law.  I remembered the way he had clasped my hand in parting.  The feeling was indefinable.  I scored myself as fanciful and conceited for imagining that there had been anything special in his farewell to me or in the little courtesies he had tendered me during my mother-in-law’s illness.  But I told myself again, as I had after closing the door upon his last visit, that it were better all around if he did not come again.

“If you wait for Richard, you’ll wait a long time,” his mother observed grimly.  “He called up a while ago, and said he had been invited to an impromptu studio party that he couldn’t get away from, and that he would be home in two or three hours.  But I know Richard.  If he gets interested in anything like that he won’t be home until midnight.”

I do not pretend either to analyze or excuse the feeling of reckless defiance that seized me upon hearing of Dicky’s absence.  I reflected bitterly that I had taken all the burden of seeing to the new home, and was suffering from illness contracted because of that work, while Dicky was frolicking at a studio party, with never a thought of me.

I know without being told that Grace Draper was a member of the frolic.  And here I was suffering, yet refusing the services of a skilled physician because I fancied there was something in his manner the tolerance of which would savor of disloyalty to Dicky!

I turned to my mother-in-law to tell her she could summon the physician, but found that I could hardly speak.  My throat felt as if I were choking.

“The spray!” I gasped.

Thoroughly alarmed, Mother Graham assisted me in spraying my throat with a strong antiseptic solution.  Then I gave her the number of Dr. Pettit’s office, and she called him up.  I heard her tell him to make haste, and then she came back to me.  I saw that she was frightened about the condition of my throat, but the choking feeling gave me no time to be frightened.  I kept the spray going almost constantly until the physician came.  It was the only way I could breathe.

Dr. Pettit must have made a record journey, for the door bell signalled his arrival only a few moments after Mother Graham’s message.

He gave my throat one swift, shrewd glance, then turned to his small valise and drew from it a stick, some absorbent cotton and a bottle of dark liquid.  With swift, sure movements he prepared a swab, and turned to me.

“Open your mouth again,” he said gently, but peremptorily.

I obeyed him, and the antiseptic bathed the swollen tonsils surely and skilfully.

As I swayed, almost staggered, in the spasm of coughing and choking which followed, I felt the strong, sure support of his arm touching my shoulders, of his hand grasping mine.