Plunged in the gloom of his apprehensions, he saw the doctors coming down the hall toward him and stopped them. "Speak before me," he said with an appeal that was a command. "You both know what I have at stake."
The three retired to the library and Kimberly listened attentively to every phase of the discussion between the two master clinicians as they laid their observations before him. The coma was undisguisedly a serious matter. It seemed to them already ingravescent and, taken in connection with the other symptoms, was even ominous. The two men, without a satisfactory history, and without a hope of obtaining one from the only available source--the suffering woman herself--discussed the case from every side, only to return unwillingly to the conclusion to which everything pointed--that a cerebral lesion underlay the attack.
Their words sent a chill to Kimberly’s heart. But the lines of defence were mapped out with speed and precision; a third eminent man, an authority on the brain, was to be sent for at once. Nurses, equal almost in themselves to good practitioners, were to be called in, and finally Hamilton and Bryson arranged that either one or the other should be at the sick-bed every instant to catch a possible moment of consciousness.
Hamilton himself returned to his patient. Bryson at the telephone took up the matter of summoning aid from town, and when he had done threw himself down for a few hours’ sleep. Kimberly followed Hamilton and returned to Alice’s side. He saw as he bent over her how the expression of her face had changed. It was drawn with a profound suffering. Kimberly sitting noiselessly down took her hand, waiting to be the first to greet her when she should open her eyes.
All Second Lake knew within a day or two of Alice’s critical illness. The third doctor had come in the morning and he remained for several days.
Hamilton questioned Annie repeatedly during the period of consultations. "Try to think, Annie," he said once, "has your mistress never at any time complained of her head?"
"Indeed, sir, I cannot remember. She never complained about herself at all. Stop, sir, she did last summer, too--what am I thinking of? I am so confused. She had a fall one night, sir. I found her in her dressing-room unconscious. Oh, she was very sick that night. She told me that she had fallen and her head had struck the table--the back of her head. For days she suffered terribly. Could it have been that, do you think?"