Sturk came home that night with a hang-dog and jaded look, and taciturn
and half desperate. But he called for whiskey, and drank a glass of that
cordial, and brewed a jug of punch in silence, and swallowed glass after
glass, and got up a little, and grew courageous and flushed, and prated
away, rather loud and thickly with a hiccough now and then, and got to
sleep earlier than usual.
Somewhere among the 'small hours' of the night he awoke suddenly,
recollecting something.
'I have it,' cried Sturk, with an oath, and an involuntary kick at the
foot-board, that made his slumbering helpmate bounce.
'What is it, Barney, dear?' squalled she, diving under the bed-clothes,
with her heart in her mouth.
'It's like a revelation,' cried Sturk, with another oath; and that was
all Mrs. Sturk heard of it for some time. But the surgeon was wide
awake, and all alive about it, whatever it was. He sat straight up in
the bed, with his lips energetically compressed, and his eyebrows
screwed together, and his shrewd, hard eyes rolling thoughtfully over
the curtains, in the dark, and now and then an ejaculation of wonder,
or a short oath, would slowly rise up, and burst from his lips, like a
great bubble from the fermentation.
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