m time to time Mahony rose and stole into the bedroom, where Mrs.
Beamish sat fanning the pests off Polly, who was in a feverish doze.
Leaning over his wife he let his finger lie on her wrist; and, back
again in the outer room, he bit nervously at his little-finger nail--an
old trick of his when in a quandary. He had curtly refused a game of
bezique; so Rogers had produced a pack of cards from his own
pocket--soiled, frayed cards, which had likely done service on many a
similar occasion--and was whiling the time away with solitaire. To sit
there watching his slow manipulation of the cards, his patent
intentness on the game; to listen any longer to the accursed din of the
gnats and flies passed Mahony's powers of endurance. Abruptly shoving
back his chair, he went out into the yard.

This was some twenty paces across--from the row of old kerosene-tins
that constituted his flower-garden, past shed and woodstack to the
post-and-rail fence. How often he walked it he did not know; but when
he went indoors again, his boots were heavy with mud. For a brief
summer storm had come up earlier in the evening. A dense black pall of
cloud had swept like a heavy curtain over the stars, to the tune of
flash and bang. Now, all was clear and calm again; the white star-dust
of the Milky Way powdered the sky just overhead; and though the heat
was still intense, the air had a fragrant smell of saturated dust and
rain-soaked earth--he could hear streamlets of water trickling down the
hillside to the river below.

Out there in the dark, several things became plain to him. He saw that
he had not had any real confidence in Rogers from the start; while the
effect of the evening spent at close quarters had been to sink his
opinion to nothing. Rogers belonged to an old school; his method was to
sit by and let nature take its course--perhaps just this slowness to
move had won him a name for extreme care. His old fogyism showed up
unmistakably in a short but heated argument they had had on the subject
of chloroform. He cited such hoary objections to the use of the new
anaesthetic in maternity cases as Mahony had never expected to hear
again: the therapeutic value of pain; the moral danger the patient ran
in yielding up her will ("What right have we to bid a fellow-creature
sacrifice her consciousness?") and the impious folly of interfering
with the action of a creative law. It had only remained for him to
quote Genesis, and the talking serpent!