They went down the porch steps, talking of indifferent matters, pausing a moment at the gate, long enough for Lynn to speak a few words in return for the greeting which the doctor's wife gave him from the window. The Watson house was near by,--only a few paces down the big road,--and they were almost immediately standing before its open door. There the doctor halted with the look of one who musters his forces after having set his thoughts in order. He drew himself up and threw back his shoulders as if settling to a firm purpose with a new determination, and he finally buttoned his coat. That poor old shabby coat! Ah! that dear old coat! So eloquent in its faded shabbiness of the many fierce storms and the many merciless suns which had beaten upon his tireless ministrations to suffering humanity! And the buttoning of the doctor's old coat was always as the girding of a warrior's armor for battle.
The young man standing beside him on the steps gave him a careless side glance. He did not understand the meaning of what he saw, and he merely smiled at its apparent absurdity. A moment later he followed the doctor into the house, all unafraid, as youth often enters upon the most appalling of the mysteries of living.
It was Anne who met them and gave them an impassive good-morning, and silently led them into the room in which her husband was sitting. The sick man, propped up in his usual seat by the window, looked round when they came in, and murmured some indistinct greeting. But his miserable, restless eyes went back almost at once to their ceaseless quest of the deserted big road, stretching dully toward the dim, distant horizon.
"How are you to-day, Tom?" asked the doctor, perfunctorily, and then he continued without waiting for a reply to his inquiry, "We are not going to let you mope like this, old boy. I've been trying to think of something to help you--to fill the time. It's after a man gets out of bed that the worst tug comes--while he is still tied to the house and yet not actually ill. We mustn't let him mope, must we, Anne?" he said.
He turned to the silent, motionless woman who sat by without so much as the natural feminine rustle of garments.
Anne looked at him through the white light of her clear eyes, but she did not speak. She had been well called a "still-tongued woman."