In the evening they sat and talked.
The visitor, whose name was Wakefield, was considerably Mahony's senior.
By his own account he had had but a rough time of it for the past couple
of years. A good practice which he had worked up in the seaport of
Warrnambool had come to an untimely end. He did not enter into the
reasons for this. "I was unfortunate . . . had a piece of ill-luck," was
how he referred to it. And knowing how fatally easy was a trip in
diagnosis, a slip of the scalpel, Mahony tactfully helped him over the
allusion. From Warrnambool Wakefield had gone to the extreme north of
the colony; but the eighteen months spent there had nearly been his
undoing. Money had not come in badly; but his wife and family had
suffered from the great heat, and the scattered nature of the work had
worn him to skin and bone. He was now casting about him for a more
suitable place. He could not afford to buy a practice, must just creep
in where he found a vacancy. And Walwala, where he understood there had
never been a resident practitioner, seemed to offer an opening.
Mahony felt genuinely sorry for the man; and after he had gone sat and
revolved the idea, in the event of Walwala proving unsuitable, of taking
Wakefield on as his assistant. He went to bed full of the scheme and
broached it to Mary before they slept. Mary made big eyes to herself as
she listened. Like a wise wife, however, she did not press her own views
that night, while the idea bubbled hot in him; for, at such times, when
some new project seemed to promise the millennium, he stood opposition
badly.
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