"You find a conscience handicaps you?" Alison inquired, for she was half amused and half interested in him.
"I'm afraid it does. For instance, I came across a man with a badly sprained wrist the other day and he offered me two dollars for anything that would cure it. Now it would have been singularly easy to have affixed a different label to my unrivaled peach-bloom cosmetic and have supplied him with a sure-to-heal embrocation. As it was, I got my supper at his place and recommended cold-water bandages. There was another man I cured of a broken leg, and I resisted the temptation to brace him up with hair-restorer."
"What remedy did you use for the broken leg?"
"Splints," said Thorne dryly, "after I'd set it."
"But isn't that a difficult thing? How did you know how to go about it?"
"No," replied Thorne, with a rather curious smile; "in an Edinburgh hospital."
Something in his manner warned her that it might not be judicious to pursue her inquiries any further, though she was, without exactly knowing why, a little curious upon the point. It occurred to her that if he had been a patient in the hospital the injured man would in all probability not have been treated in his sight, while it seemed somewhat strange that he should now be peddling patent medicines in Canada had he been qualifying for his diploma. He, however, said nothing more, and they drove on in silence for a while.
They stopped in a thin grove of birches at midday for a meal which Thorne prepared, and it was late in the afternoon when Alison, who ached with the jolting, asked if Graham's Bluff was very much farther. It struck her that the fact that she had not made the inquiry earlier said a good deal for her companion's conversational powers.
"Oh, yes," he answered casually, "it's most of thirty miles."
"But--" she said and stopped, for it was evident that her misgivings could not very well be expressed.
"We're not going through to-night," Thorne explained. "The team have had about enough already, and there's a farmer ahead who'll take us in. If we reach the Bluff by to-morrow afternoon it will be as much as one could expect."
Alison did not care to ask whether the farmer was married, though as there seemed to be singularly few women in the country she was afraid that it was scarcely probable. There was, however, no doubt that she must face the unusual and somewhat embarrassing situation.