The healer Author:Robert Herrick Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The summer wore away into a sunny, windless autumn. Day after day the lake lay like an unruffled, velvet pool, touching smoothly the black rocks, laced ar... more »ound its shores by the shadows from the encircling forest. The hotel across the bay, bereft of flaunting flags, had been deserted; the transient gayety of holiday life on the water had altogether disappeared. All the camps were closed except the Eyrie, whose mistress chafed at her enforced delay in the wilderness. The sick girl was about once more, — in the sunlight on the sheltered veranda, before the blazing fire. But the strange Wild One, as Vera Councillor had named the doctor, did not relax his domination. Having won the first battle for life itself with a flourish of trumpets, as it were, he was engaged in another, greater struggle, — a silent struggle in the autumnal peace for the true balance of mind that would mean health. Patient and doctor must go down together into the trough of despair, — that point of danger hinted at by the city physicians, — and meet there the darker enemies of life. More and more while this subtle hidden battle for full health was going on the doctor kept his patient apart from the others, took her in his canoe up the lake on little expeditions where she might lie in solitude and drink in the healing light and air undisturbed. As the two women stood on the piazza one afternoon andwatched the doctor's canoe disappear around the little headland, there was an added frown on the wrinkled brow of Mrs. Goodnow, accentuating her habitual criticism of life. She disapproved of the Wild One and all his works, and if she dared would have forbidden these excursions. The younger woman, watching the small craft float out of sight in the yellow blaze of the afternoon sun, smiled to herself. She compre...« less