What she had expected was an illness which would last perhaps a week, and this long lingering malady confounded and exasperated her. She was angry with poor Mar for being so long about deciding what to do, and with the doctor who would not say anything definite, and the nurses whose opinions wavered from hour to hour. “How is a person to tell when you are never in the same mind from one hour to another?” she said with the resentment of highly excited nerves. She was strung to the very highest pitch, thinking of nothing else, longing for a crisis, that she might know what she had to look for. She was never at rest for a moment whatever she was doing, but kept always listening, always intent. Every step that approached she thought was some one come to call her, to tell her there was a change. She dropped her work upon her knee, or let her pen fall, to listen for every sound that arose. On the critical day of each week when a crisis might be expected she was so restless that she could not keep still. “My wife is so anxious,” John said, trying to persuade himself that her anxiety was the natural anxiety, the desire that the patient should get well. That anxiety is terrible enough as most know; but the other anxiety, the horrible watch which is for the patient getting worse, the longing for “a change” in the worst sense--a change that meant death, how horrible is that, beyond all description! When she talked at all she talked of his symptoms and of what the night nurse said, and what the other said. The nurses took different sides as was natural. One of them was pessimist, the other took the doctor’s view. It was the night nurse that was the gloomy one--and with her Mrs. Parke was in the habit of having a long consultation very early when she was relieved in the morning--a consultation from which she derived a little satisfaction, and which calmed her nervous excitement. But the day nurse with the cheerful look, who always insisted that the patient was a little better, or looked a little brighter, or had a little more strength, or at all events was “no worse,” brought back the nervous excitement which was like a fire in her veins.