A Simpleton. Charles Reade Reade

lay on the sofa, just as we left her. Only her bosom began to heave.

      Then Christopher Staines drew himself up, and the majesty of knowledge and love together seemed to dilate his noble frame. He fixed his eye on that reclining, panting figure, and stepped lightly but firmly across the room to know the worst, like a lion walking up to levelled lances.

CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

      The young physician walked steadily up to his patient without taking his eye off her, and drew a chair to her side.

      Then she took down one hand—the left—and gave it him, averting her face tenderly, and still covering it with her right; “For,” said she to herself, “I am such a fright now.” This opportune reflection, and her heaving bosom, proved that she at least felt herself something more than his patient. Her pretty consciousness made his task more difficult; nevertheless, he only allowed himself to press her hand tenderly with both his palms one moment, and then he entered on his functions bravely. “I am here as your physician.”

      “Very well,” said she softly.

      He gently detained the hand, and put his finger lightly to her pulse; it was palpitating, and a fallacious test. Oh, how that beating pulse, by love's electric current, set his own heart throbbing in a moment!

      He put her hand gently, reluctantly down, and said, “Oblige me by turning this way.” She turned, and he winced internally at the change in her; but his face betrayed nothing. He looked at her full; and, after a pause, put her some questions: one was as to the color of the hemorrhage. She said it was bright red.

      “Not a tinge of purple?”

      “No,” said she hopefully, mistaking him.

      He suppressed a sigh.

      Then he listened at her shoulder-blade and at her chest, and made her draw her breath while he was listening. The acts were simple, and usual in medicine, but there was a deep, patient, silent intensity about his way of doing them.

      Mr. Lusignan crept nearer, and stood with both hands on a table, and his old head bowed, awaiting yet dreading the verdict.

      Up to this time, Dr. Staines, instead of tapping and squeezing, and pulling the patient about, had never touched her with his hand, and only grazed her with his ear; but now he said “Allow me,” and put both hands to her waist, more lightly and reverently than I can describe; “Now draw a deep breath, if you please.”

      “There!”

      “If you could draw a deeper still,” said he, insinuatingly.

      “There, then!” said she, a little pettishly.

      Dr. Staines's eye kindled.

      “Hum!” said he. Then, after a considerable pause, “Are you better or worse after each hemorrhage?”

      “La!” said Rosa; “they never asked me that. Why, better.”

      “No faintness?”

      “Not a bit.”

      “Rather a sense of relief, perhaps?”

      “Yes; I feel lighter and better.”

      The examination was concluded.

      Dr. Staines looked at Rosa, and then at her father. The agony in that aged face, and the love that agony implied, won him, and it was to the parent he turned to give his verdict.

      “The hemorrhage is from the lungs”—

      Lusignan interrupted him: “From the lungs!” cried he, in dismay.

      “Yes; a slight congestion of the lungs.”

      “But not incurable! Oh, not incurable, doctor!”

      “Heaven forbid! It is curable—easily—by removing the cause.”

      “And what is the cause?”

      “The cause?”—he hesitated, and looked rather uneasy.—“Well, the cause, sir, is—tight stays.”

      The tranquillity of the meeting was instantly disturbed. “Tight stays! Me!” cried Rosa. “Why, I am the loosest girl in England. Look, papa!” And, without any apparent effort, she drew herself in, and poked her little fist between her sash and her gown. “There!”

      Dr. Staines smiled sadly and a little sarcastically: he was evidently shy of encountering the lady in this argument; but he was more at his ease with her father; so he turned towards him and lectured him freely.

      “That is wonderful, sir; and the first four or five female patients that favored me with it, made me disbelieve my other senses; but Miss Lusignan is now about the thirtieth who has shown me that marvellous feat, with a calm countenance that belies the herculean effort. Nature has her every-day miracles: a boa-constrictor, diameter seventeen inches, can swallow a buffalo; a woman, with her stays bisecting her almost, and lacerating her skin, can yet for one moment make herself seem slack, to deceive a juvenile physician. The snake is the miracle of expansion; the woman is the prodigy of contraction.”

      “Highly grateful for the comparison!” cried Rosa. “Women and snakes!”

      Dr. Staines blushed and looked uncomfortable. “I did not mean to be offensive; it certainly was a very clumsy comparison.”

      “What does that matter?” said Mr. Lusignan, impatiently. “Be quiet, Rosa, and let Dr. Staines and me talk sense.”

      “Oh, then I am nobody in the business!” said this wise young lady.

      “You are everybody,” said Staines, soothingly. “But,” suggested he, obsequiously, “if you don't mind, I would rather explain my views to your father—on this one subject.”

      “And a pretty subject it is!”

      Dr. Staines then invited Mr. Lusignan to his lodgings, and promised to explain the matter anatomically. “Meantime,” said he, “would you be good enough to put your hands to my waist, as I did to the patient's.”

      Mr. Lusignan complied; and the patient began to titter directly, to put them out of countenance.

      “Please observe what takes place when I draw a full breath.

      “Now apply the same test to the patient. Breathe your best, please, Miss Lusignan.”

      The patient put on a face full of saucy mutiny.

      “To oblige us both.”

      “Oh, how tiresome!”

      “I am aware it is rather laborious,” said Staines, a little dryly; “but to oblige your father!”

      “Oh, anything to oblige papa,” said she, spitefully. “There! And I do hope it will be the last—la! no; I don't hope that, neither.”

      Dr. Staines politely ignored her little attempts to interrupt the argument. “You found, sir, that the muscles of my waist, and my intercostal ribs themselves, rose and fell with each inhalation and exhalation of air by the lungs.”

      “I did; but my daughter's waist was like dead wood, and so were her lower ribs.”

      At this volunteer statement, Rosa colored to her temples. “Thanks, papa! Pack me off to London, and sell me for a big doll!”

      “In other words,” said the lecturer, mild and pertinacious, “with us the lungs have room to blow, and the whole bony frame expands elastic with them, like the woodwork of a blacksmith's bellows; but with this patient, and many of her sex, that noble and divinely framed bellows is crippled and confined by a powerful machine of human construction; so it works lamely and feebly: consequently