"I am," said the White Linen Nurse complacently.

With a muttered ejaculation the Senior Surgeon jumped to his feet and stood glaring down at her.

Quite ingenuously the White Linen Nurse met and parried the glare.

"A gentleman—and a red-haired kiddie—and a great walloping house—all at once! It's too much!" she confided genially. "Thank you just the same, but I'd rather take them gradually. First of all, sir, you see, I've got to teach the little kiddie to like me! And then there's a green-tiled paper with floppity sea gulls on it—that I want to try for the bath-room! And—and—" Ecstatically she clapped her hands together. "Oh, sir! There are such loads and loads of experiments I want to try while you are off on your spree!"

"S—h—h!" cried the Senior Surgeon. His face was suddenly blanched,—his mouth, twitching like the mouth of one stricken with almost insupportable pain. "For God's sake, Miss Malgregor!" he pleaded, "can't you call it my—Canadian trip?"

Wider and wider the White Linen Nurse opened her big blue eyes at him.

"But it is a 'spree,' sir!" she attested resolutely. "And my father says—" Still resolutely her young mouth curved to its original assertion, but from under her heavy-shadowing eyelashes a little blue smile crept softly out. "When my father's got a lame trotting horse, sir, that he's trying to shuck off his hands," she faltered, "he doesn't ever go round mournful-like with his head hanging—telling folks about his wonderful trotter that's just 'the littlest, teeniest, tiniest bit—lame.' Oh no! What father does is to call up every one he knows within twenty miles and tell 'em, 'Say Tom,—Bill,—Harry,'—or whatever his name is—'what in the deuce do you suppose I've got over here in my barn? A lame horse—that wants to trot! Lamer than the deuce, you know! But can do a mile in 2.40.'" Faintly the little blue smile quickened again in the White Linen Nurse's eyes. "And the barn will be full of men in half an hour!" she said. "Somehow nobody wants a trotter that's lame! But almost anybody seems willing to risk a lame horse—that's plucky enough to trot!"

"What's the 'lame trotting horse' got to do with—me?" snarled the Senior Surgeon incisively.

Darkly the White Linen Nurse's lashes fringed down across her cheeks.

"Nothing much," she said, "Only—"

"Only what?" demanded the Senior Surgeon. A little more roughly than he realized he stooped down and took the White Linen Nurse by her shoulders, and jerked her sharply round to the light. "Only what?" he insisted peremptorily.

Almost plaintively she lifted her eyes to his. "Only—my father says," she confided obediently, "my father says if you've got a worse foot—for Heaven's sake put it forward—and get it over with!

"So—I've got to call it a 'spree'!" smiled the White Linen Nurse. "'Cause when I think of marrying a—surgeon—that goes off and gets drunk every June—it—it scares me almost to my death! But—" Abruptly the red smile faded from her lips, the blue smile from her eyes. "But—when I think of marrying a—June drunk—that's got the grit to pull up absolutely straight as a die and be a surgeon—all the other 'leven months in the year—" Dartingly she bent down and kissed the Senior Surgeon's astonished wrist. "Oh, then I think you're perfectly grand!" she sobbed.

Awkwardly the Senior Surgeon pulled away and began to pace the floor.

"You're a—good little girl, Rae Malgregor," he mumbled huskily. "A good little girl. I truly believe you're the kind that will—see me through." Poignantly in his eyes humiliation overwhelmed the mist. Perversely in its turn resentment overtook the humiliation. "But I won't be married in June!" he reasserted bombastically. "I won't! I won't! I won't! I tell you I positively refuse to have a lot of damn fools speculating about my private affairs! Wondering why I didn't take you! Wondering why I didn't stay home with you! I tell you I won't! I simply won't!"

"Yes, sir," stammered the White Linen Nurse.

With a real gasp of relief the Senior Surgeon stopped his eternal pacing of the floor.

"Bully for you!" he said. "You mean then we'll be married some time in July after I get back from my—trip?"

"Oh, no, sir," stammered the White Linen Nurse.

"But Great Heavens!" shouted the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, sir," the White Linen Nurse began all over again. Dreamily planning out her wedding gown, her lips without the slightest conscious effort on her part were already curving into shape for her alternate "No, sir."

"You're an idiot!" snapped the Senior Surgeon.

A little reproachfully the White Linen Nurse came frowning out of her reverie. "Would it do just as well for traveling, do you think?" she asked, with real concern.

"Eh? What?" said the Senior Surgeon.

"I mean—does Japan spot?" queried the White Linen Nurse. "Would it spot a serge, I mean?"

"Oh, Hell with Japan!" jerked the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.

Now perhaps you will understand just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon and the White Linen Nurse were married on the first day of June, and just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon went off alone as usual on his Canadian trip, and just exactly how it happened that the White Linen Nurse came home alone to the Senior Surgeon's great, gloomy house, to find her brand new step-daughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. Everything now is perfectly comfortably explained except the turquoise-colored stockings. Nobody could explain the turquoise-colored stockings!

But even a little child could explain the ensuing June! Oh, June was perfectly wonderful that year! Bud, blossom, bird-song, breeze,—rioting headlong through the Land. Warm days sweet and lush as a green-house vapor! Crisp nights faintly metallic like the scent of stars! Hurdy-gurdies romping tunefully on every street-corner! Even the Ash-Man flushing frankly pink across his dusty cheek-bones!

Like two fairies who had sublet a giant's cave the White Linen Nurse and the Little Crippled Girl turned themselves loose upon the Senior Surgeon's gloomy old house.

It certainly was a gloomy old house, but handsome withal,—square and brown and substantial, and most generously gardened within high brick walls. Except for dusting the lilac bushes with the hose, and weeding a few rusty leaves out of the privet hedge, and tacking up three or four scraggly sprays of English ivy, and re-greening one or two bay-tree boxes, there was really nothing much to do to the garden. But the house? Oh ye gods! All day long from morning till night,—but most particularly from the back door to the barn, sweating workmen scuttled back and forth till nary a guilty piece of black walnut furniture had escaped. All day long from morning till night,—but most particularly from ceilings to floors, sweltering workmen scurried up and down step-ladders stripping dingy papers from dingier plasterings.

When the White Linen Nurse wasn't busy renovating the big house—or the little step-daughter, she was writing to the Senior Surgeon. She wrote twice.

"Dear Dr. Faber," the first letter said.

* * * * *

DEAR DR. FABER,

How do you do? Thank you very much, for saying you didn't care what in thunder I did to the house. It looks sweet. I've put white fluttery muslin curtains most everywhere. And you've got a new solid-gold-looking bed in your room. And the Kiddie and I have fixed up the most scrumptious light blue suite for ourselves in the ell. Pink was wrong for the front hall, but it cost me only $29.00 to find out. And now that's settled for all time.

I am very, very, very, very busy. Something strange and new happens every day. Yesterday it was three ladies and a plumber. One of the ladies was just selling soap, but I didn't buy any. It was horrid soap. The other two were calling ladies,—a silk one and a velvet one. The silk one tried to be nasty to me. Right to my face she told me I was more of a lady than she had dared to hope. And I told her I was sorry for that as you'd had one "lady" and it didn't work. Was that all right? But the other lady was nice. And I took her out in the kitchen with me while I was painting the woodwork, and right there in her white kid gloves she laughed and showed me how to mix the paint pearl gray. She was nice. It was your sister-in-law.

I like being married, Dr. Faber. I like it lots better than I thought I would. It's fun being the biggest person in the house. Respectfully yours, RAE MALGREGOR,—AS WAS.

P.S. Oh, I hope it wasn't wrong, but in your ulster pocket, when I went to put it away, I found a bottle of something that smelt as though it had been forgotten.—I threw it out.

* * * * *

It was this letter that drew the only definite message from the itinerant bridegroom.

"Kindly refrain from rummaging in my ulster pockets," wrote the Senior Surgeon quite briefly. "The 'thing' you threw out happened to be the cerebellum and medulla of an extremely eminent English Theologian!"

"Even so,—it was sour," telegraphed the White Linen Nurse in a perfect agony of remorse and humiliation.

The telegram took an Indian with a birch canoe two days to deliver, and cost the Senior Surgeon twelve dollars. Just impulsively the Senior Surgeon decided to make no further comments on domestic affairs,—at that particular range.

Very fortunately for this impulse the White Linen Nurse's second letter concerned itself almost entirely with matters quite extraneous to the home.

"Dear Dr. Faber," the second letter ran.

* * * * *

DEAR DR. FABER,

Somehow I don't seem to care so much just now about being the biggest person in the house. Something awful has happened. Zillah Forsyth is dead. Really dead, I mean. And she died in great heroism. You remember Zillah Forsyth, don't you? She was one of my room-mates,—not the gooder one, you know,—not the swell,—that was Helene Churchill. But Zillah? Oh you know! Zillah was the one you sent out on that Fractured Elbow case. It was a Yale student, you remember? And there was some trouble about kissing,—and she got sent home? And now everybody's crying because Zillah can't kiss anybody any more! Isn't everything the limit? Well, it wasn't a fractured Yale student she got sent out on this time. If it had been, she might have been living yet. What they sent her out on this time was a Senile Dementia,—an old lady more than eighty years old. And they were in a sanitarium or something like that. And there was a fire in the night. And the old lady just up and positively refused to escape. And Zillah had to push her and shove her and yank her and carry her—out the window—along the gutters—round the chimneys. And the old lady bit Zillah right through the hand,—but Zillah wouldn't let go. And the old lady tried to drown Zillah under a bursted water tank,—but Zillah wouldn't let go. And everybody hollered to Zillah to cut loose and save herself,—but Zillah wouldn't let go. And a wall fell, and everything, and oh, it was awful,—but Zillah never let go. And the old lady that wasn't any good to any one,—not even herself, got saved of course. But Zillah? Oh, Zillah got hurt bad, sir! We saw her at the hospital, Helene and I. She sent for us about something. Oh, it was awful! Not a thing about her that you'd know except just her great solemn eyes mooning out at you through a gob of white cotton, and her red mouth lipping sort of twitchy at the edge of a bandage. Oh it was awful! But Zillah didn't seem to care so much. There was a new Interne there,—a Japanese, and I guess she was sort of taken with him. "But my God, Zillah," I said, "your life was worth more than that old dame's!"

"Shut your noise!" says Zillah. "It was my job. And there's no kick coming." Helene burst right out crying, she did. "Shut your noise, too!" says Zillah, just as cool as you please. "Bah! There's other lives and other chances!"

"Oh, you do believe that now?" cries Helene. "Oh, you do believe that now,—what the Bible promises you?" That was when Zillah shrugged her shoulders so funny,—the little way she had. Gee, but her eyes were big! "I don't pretend to know—what—your old Bible says," she choked. "It was—the Yale feller—who was tellin' me."

That's all, Dr. Faber. It was her shrugging her shoulders so funny that brought on the hemorrhage.

Oh, we had an awful time, sir, going home in the carriage,—Helene and I. We both cried, of course, because Zillah was dead, but after we got through crying for that, Helene kept right on crying because she couldn't understand why a brave girl like Zillah had to be dead. Gee! But Helene takes things hard. Ladies do, I guess.

I hope you're having a pleasant spree.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that one of the wall-paperers is living here at the house with us just now. We use him so much it's truly a good deal more convenient. And he's a real nice young fellow, and he plays the piano finely, and he comes from up my way. And it seemed more neighborly anyway. It's so large in the house at night, just now, and so creaky in the garden.

With kindest regards, good-by for now, from RAE.

P.S.

Don't tell your guide or any one! But Helene sent Zillah's mother a check for fifteen hundred dollars. I saw it with my own eyes. And all Zillah asked for that day was just a little blue serge suit. It seems she'd promised her kid sister a little blue serge suit for July. And it sort of worried her.

Helene sent the little blue serge suit too! And a hat! The hat had bluebells on it. Do you think when you come home—if I haven't spent too much money on wall-papers—that I could have a blue hat with bluebells on it? Excuse me for bothering you—but you forgot to leave me enough money.

* * * * *

It was some indefinite, pleasant time on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June, that the Senior Surgeon received this second letter.

It was Friday the twenty-sixth of June, exactly at dawn, that the Senior Surgeon started homeward.

Nobody looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn't. Heavily as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling shadows circled. Behind his sunburn,—deeper than his tan, something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul.

Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake time the previous evening.

Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe slosh-sloshed against the beach.

There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape. Just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee grounds.

Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian Guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.

"Cutting your trip a bit short this year,—ain't you, Boss?" quizzed the Indian guide.

Out from his muffling mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered with studied lightness. "There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little."

"A woman, eh?" said the Indian Guide laconically.

"A woman?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "A—woman? Oh, ye gods! No! It's wall paper!"

Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing,—boisterously, hilariously like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him.

The Senior Surgeon's laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a purely convulsive physical impulse. But the echo's laugh was a phantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness.

Seven miles further down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian Guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two rocks,—paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian Guide lifted his voice high,—piercing, above the swirling roar of waters.

"Eh, Boss!" shouted the Indian Guide. "I ain't never heard you laugh before!"

Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long, strenuous hours that were left to them.

The Indian Guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cow-shed. I don't know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out.

It was just four days later from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack that the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate.

Even though a man likes home no better than he likes—tea, few men would deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long fussy railroad journey. Five o'clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a peculiarly wonderful time to be arriving home,—especially if that home has a garden around it so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously upon the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy visually with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the actual draught.

Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and his heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long, broad gravel path to the house. For a man walking as slow as he was, his heart was beating most extraordinarily fast. He was not accustomed to heart-palpitation. The symptom worried him a trifle. Incidentally also his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of June. Close at his right an effulgent white and gold syringa bush flaunted its cloying sweetness into his senses. Close at his left a riotous bloom of phlox clamored red-blue-purple-lavender-pink into his dazzled vision. Multi-colored pansies tiptoed velvet-footed across the grass. In soft murky mystery a flame-tinted smoke tree loomed up here and there like a faintly rouged ghost. Over everything, under everything, through everything, lurked a certain strange, novel, vibrating consciousness of occupancy. Bees in the rose bushes! Bobolinks in the trees! A woman's work-basket in the curve of the hammock! A doll's tea set sprawling cheerfully in the middle of the broad gravel path!

It was not until the Senior Surgeon had actually stepped into the tiny cream pitcher that he noticed the presence of the doll's tea set.

It was what the Senior Surgeon said as he stepped out of the cream pitcher that summoned the amazing apparition from a ragged green hole in the privet hedge. Startlingly white, startlingly professional,—dress, cap, apron and all,—a miniature white linen nurse sprang suddenly out at him like a tricky dwarf in a moving picture show. Just at that particular moment the Senior Surgeon's nerves were in no condition to wrestle with apparitions. Simultaneously as the clumsy rod-case dropped from his hand, the expression of enthusiasm dropped from the face of the miniature white linen nurse.

"Oh, dear—oh, dear—oh, dear! Have you come home?" wailed the familiar, shrill little voice.

Sheepishly the Senior Surgeon picked up his rod-case. The noises in his head were crashing like cracked bells. Desperately with a boisterous irritability he sought to cover also the lurching pound-pound-pound of his heart.

"What in Hell are you rigged out like that for?" he demanded stormily.

With equal storminess the Little Girl protested the question.

"Peach said I could!" she attested passionately. "Peach said I could! She did! She did! I tell you I didn't want her to marry us—that day! I was afraid, I was! I cried, I did! I had a convulsion! They thought it was stockings! So Peach said if it would make me feel any gooderer, I could be the cruel new step-mother. And she'd be the unloved offspring—with her hair braided all yellow fluffikins down her back!"

"Where is—Miss Malgregor?" asked the Senior Surgeon sharply.

Irrelevantly the Little Girl sank down on the gravel walk and began to gather up her scattered dishes.

"And it's fun to go to bed—now," she confided amiably. "'Cause every night I put Peach to bed at eight o'clock and she's so naughty always I have to stay with her! And then all of a sudden it's morning—like going through a black room without knowing it!"

"I said—where is Miss Malgregor?" repeated the Senior Surgeon with increasing sharpness.

Thriftily the Little Girl bent down to lap a bubble of cream from the broken pitcher.

"Oh, she's out in the summer house with the Wall Paper Man," she mumbled indifferently.



CHAPTER IX

Altogether jerkily the Senior Surgeon started up the walk for his own perfectly formal and respectable brown stone mansion. Deep down in his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account cedar summer house.

Startled by the crackle and thud of his approach the two young figures in the summer house jumped precipitously to their feet, and limply untwining their arms from each other's necks stood surveying the Senior Surgeon in unspeakable consternation,—the White Linen Nurse and a blue overalled lad most unconscionably mated in radiant youth and agonized confusion.

"Oh, my Lord, Sir!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Oh, my Lord, Sir! I wasn't looking for you—for another week!"

"Evidently not!" said the Senior Surgeon incisively. "This is the second time this evening that I've been led to infer that my home-coming was distinctly inopportune!"

Very slowly, very methodically, he put down first his precious rod-case and then his grip. His brain seemed fairly foaming with blood and confusion. Along the swelling veins of his arms a dozen primitive instincts went surging to his fists.

Then quite brazenly before his eyes the White Linen Nurse reached out and took the lad's hand again.

"Oh, forgive me, Dr. Faber!" she faltered. "This is my brother!"

"Your brother?—what?—eh?" choked the Senior Surgeon. Bluntly he reached out and crushed the young fellow's fingers in his own. "Glad to see you, Son!" he muttered with a sickish sort of grin, and turning abruptly, picked up his baggage again and started for the big house.

Half a step behind him his White Linen Bride followed softly.

At the edge of the piazza he turned for an instant and eyed her a bit quizzically. With her big credulous blue eyes, and her great mop of yellow hair braided childishly down her back, she looked inestimably more juvenile and innocent than his own little shrewd-faced six-year-old whom he had just left domestically ensconced in the middle of the broad gravel path.

"For Heaven's sake, Miss Malgregor," he asked. "For Heaven's sake—why didn't you tell me that the Wall Paper Man was your—brother?"

Very contritely the White Linen Nurse's chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress and as bashfully as a child one finger came stealing up to the edge of her red, red lips.

"I was afraid you'd think I was—cheeky—having any of my family come and live with us—so soon," she murmured almost inaudibly.

"Well, what did you think I'd think you were—if he wasn't your brother?" asked the Senior Surgeon sardonically.

"Very—economical, I hoped!" beamed the White Linen Nurse.

"All the same!" snapped the Senior Surgeon, with an irrelevance surprising even to himself. "All the same do you think it sounds quite right and proper for a child to call her—step-mother—'Peach'?"

Again the White Linen Nurse's chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress. "I don't suppose it is—usual," she admitted reluctantly. "The children next door, I notice, call theirs—'Cross-Patch.'"

With a gesture of impatience the Senior Surgeon proceeded up the steps,—yanked open the old-fashioned shuttered door, and burst quite breathlessly and unprepared upon his most amazingly reconstructed house. All in one single second chintzes,—muslins,—pale blonde maples,—riotous canary birds,—stormed revolutionary upon his outraged eyes. Reeling back utterly aghast before the sight, he stood there staring dumbly for an instant at what he considered,—and rightly too,—the absolute wreck of his black walnut home.

"It looks like—Hell!" he muttered feebly.

"Yes, isn't it sweet?" conceded the White Linen Nurse with unmistakable joyousness. "And your library—" Triumphantly she threw back the door to his grim work-shop.

"Good God!" stammered the Senior Surgeon. "You've made it—pink!"

Rapturously the White Linen Nurse began to clasp and unclasp her hands. "I knew you'd love it!" she said.

Half dazed with bewilderment the Senior Surgeon started to brush an imaginary haze from his eyes but paused mid-way in the gesture and pointed back instead to a dapper little hall-table that seemed to be exhausting its entire blonde strength in holding up a slender green vase with a single pink rose in it. Like a caged animal buffeting for escape against each successive bar that incased it, the man's frenzied irritation hurled itself hopefully against this one more chance for explosive exit.

"What—have—you—done—with the big—black—escritoire that stood—there?" he demanded accusingly.

"Escritoire?—Escritoire?" worried the White Linen Nurse. "Why—why—I'm afraid I must have mislaid it."

"Mislaid it?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "Mislaid it? It weighed three hundred pounds!"

"Oh, it did?" questioned the White Linen Nurse with great, blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire she climbed up suddenly into a chair and with the fluffy broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildy off into space after an illusive cobweb.

Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon's temper began to search for a new point of exit.

"What do you suppose the—servants think of you?" he stormed. "Running round like that with your hair in a pig-tail like a—kid?"

"Servants?" cooed the White Linen Nurse. "Servants?" Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon's hectic face. "Why, there aren't any servants," she explained patiently. "I've dismissed every one of them. We're doing our own work now!"

"Doing 'our own work'?" gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Quite worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little. "Why, wasn't that right?" she pleaded. "Wasn't it right? Why, I thought people always did their own work when they were first married!" With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock, and darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a fierce-looking knife.

"I'm so late now and everything," she confided. "Could you peel the potatoes for me?"

"No, I couldn't!" said the Senior Surgeon shortly. Equally shortly he turned on his heel, and reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip went on up the stairs to his own room.

One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the sound of other people getting supper.

Stretched out full length in a big easy chair by his bed-room window, with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new "solid gold bed" and his new sage green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the faint, far-away accompaniment of soft thudding feet, and a girl's laugh, and a child's prattle, and the tink-tink-tinkle of glass,—china,—silver,—all scurrying consciously to the service of one man,—and that man,—himself.

Very, very slowly, in that special half hour an inscrutable little smile printed itself experimentally across the right hand corner of the Senior Surgeon's upper lip.

While that smile was still in its infancy he jumped up suddenly and forced his way across the hall to his dead wife's room,—the one ghost-room of his house and his life,—and there with his hand on the turning door knob,—tense with reluctance,—goose-fleshed with strain,—his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one word—"Alice!"

And behold! There was no room there!

Lurching back from the threshold, as from the brink of an elevator well, the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous linen closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for pleasant prosy blankets, and gaily fringed towels, and cheerful white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender. Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance how the change of a partition, the re-adjustment of a proportion, had purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of an ill-favored memory. Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a linen closet to be built right there,—so inevitable did it suddenly seem for the child's meager play-room to be enlarged just there, that to save his soul he could not estimate whether the happy plan had originated in a purely practical brain or a purely compassionate heart.

Half proud of the brain, half touched by the heart, he passed on exploringly through the new play-room out into the hall again.

Quite distinctly now through the aperture of the back stairs the kitchen voices came wafting up to him.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" wailed his Little Girl's peevish voice. "Now that—that Man's come back again—I suppose we'll have to eat in the dining-room—all the time!"

"'That Man' happens to be your darling father!" admonished the White Linen Nurse's laughing voice.

"Even so," wailed the Little Girl, "I love you best."

"Even so," laughed the White Linen Nurse, "I love you best!"

"Just the same," cried the Little Girl shrilly, "just the same—let's put the cream pitcher way up high somewhere—so he can't step in it!"

As though from a head tilted suddenly backward the White Linen Nurse's laugh rang out in joyous abandon.

Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin. Then equally impulsively the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was clumsy? Eh? Resentfully he stared down at his hands,—those wonderfully dexterous,—yes, ambidexterous hands that were the aching envy of all his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared the voice of the young Wall Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway.

"Supper's all ready, sir!" called the cordial voice.

For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment, almost nothing in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than to be invited to his own supper,—in his own house,—by a stranger. Fuming with a new sense of injury and injustice he started heavily down the stairs to the dining-room.

Standing patiently behind the Senior Surgeon's chair with a laudable desire to assist his carving in any possible emergency that might occur, the White Linen Nurse experienced her first direct marital rebuff.

"What do you think this is? An autopsy?" demanded the Senior Surgeon tartly. "For Heaven's sake—sit down!"

Quite meekly the White Linen Nurse subsided into her place.

The meal that ensued could hardly have been called a success though the room was entrancing,—the cloth, snow-white—the silver, radiant,—the guinea chicken beyond reproach.

Swept and garnished to an alarming degree the young Wall Paper Man presided over the gravy and did his uttermost, innocent country-best to make the Senior Surgeon feel perfectly at home.

Conscientiously, as in the presence of a distinguished stranger, the Little Crippled Girl most palpably from time to time repressed her insatiable desire to build a towering pyramid out of all the salt and pepper shakers she could reach.

Once when the young Wall Paper Man forgot himself to the extent of putting his knife in his mouth, the White Linen Nurse jarred the whole table with the violence of her warning kick.

Once when the Little Crippled Girl piped out impulsively, "Say, Peach,—what was the name of that bantam your father used to fight against the minister's bantam?" the White Linen Nurse choked piteously over her food.

Twice some one spoke about this year's weather.

Twice some one volunteered an illuminating remark about last year's weather.

Except for these four diversions restraint indescribable hung like a horrid pall over the feast.

Next to feeling unwelcome in your friend's house, nothing certainly is more wretchedly disconcerting than to feel unwelcome in your own house!

Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to grab up all the knives within reach and ram them successively into his own mouth just to prove to the young Wall Paper Man what a—what a devil of a good fellow he was himself! Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to tell the White Linen Nurse about the pet bantam of his own boyhood days—that he bet a dollar could lick any bantam her father ever dreamed of owning! Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to talk dolls,—dishes,—kittens,—yes, even cream pitchers, to his Little Daughter, to talk anything in fact—to any one,—to talk—sing—shout anything—that should make him, at least for the time being, one at heart, one at head, one at table, with this astonishingly offish bunch of youngsters!

But grimly instead,—out of his frazzled nerves,—out of his innate spiritual bashfulness, he merely roared forth, "Where are the potatoes?"

"Potatoes?" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Potatoes? Oh, potatoes?" she finished more blithely. "Why, yes, of course! Don't you remember—you didn't have time to peel them for me? I was so disappointed!"

"You were so disappointed?" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "You?—you?"

Janglingly the Little Crippled Girl knelt right up in her chair and shook her tiny fist right in her father's face.

"Now, Lendicott Paber!" she screamed. "Don't you start in—sassing—my darling little Peach!"

"Peach?" snorted the Senior Surgeon. With almost supernatural calm he put down his knife and fork and eyed his offspring with an expression of absolutely inflexible purpose. "Don't you—ever," he warned her, "ever—ever—let me hear you call—this woman 'Peach' again!"

A trifle faint-heartedly the Little Crippled Girl reached up and straightened her absurdly diminutive little white cap, and pursed her little mouth as nearly as possible into an expression of ineffable peace.

"Why—Lendicott Faber!" she persisted heroically.

"Lendicott?" jumped the Senior Surgeon. "What are you—'Lendicotting' me for?"

Hilariously with her own knife and fork the Little Crippled Girl began to beat upon the table.

"Why, you dear Silly!" she cried. "Why, if I'm the new Marma, I've got to call you 'Lendicott'! And Peach has got to call you 'Fat Father'!"

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair, and jumped to his feet. The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there before.

"God!" he said. "This gives me the willies!" and strode tempestuously from the room.

Out in his own work-shop fortunately,—whatever the grotesque new pinkness,—whatever the grotesque new perkiness—his great free walking-spaces had not been interfered with. Slamming his door triumphantly behind him, he resumed once more the monotonous pace-pace-pace that had characterized for eighteen years his first night's return to—the obligations of civilization.

Sharply around the corner of his old battered desk the little path started,—wanly along the edge of his dingy book-shelves the little path furrowed,—wistfully at the deep bay-window where his favorite lilac bush budded whitely for his departure, and rusted brownly for his return, the little path faltered,—and went on again,—on and on and on,—into the alcove where his instruments glistened,—up to the fireplace where his college trophy-cups tarnished! Listlessly the Senior Surgeon re-commenced his yearly vigil. Up and down,—up and down,—round and round,—on and on and on,—through interminable dusks to unattainable dawns,—a glutted, bacchanalian Soul sweating its own way back to sanctity and leanness! Nerves always were in that vigil,—raw, rattling nerves clamoring vociferously to be repacked in their sedatives. Thirst also was in that vigil,—no mere whimpering tickle of the palate, but a drought of the tissues,—a consuming fire of the bones! Hurt pride was also there, and festering humiliation!

But more rasping, this particular night, than nerves, more poignant than thirst, more dangerously excitative even than remorse, hunger rioted in him,—hunger, the one worst enemy of the Senior Surgeon's cause,—the simple, silly, no-account,—gnawing,—drink-provocative hunger of an empty stomach. And 'one other hunger was also there,—a sudden fierce new lust for Life and Living,—a passion bare of love yet pure of wantonness,—a passion primitive,—protective,—inexorably proprietary,—engendered strangely in that one mad, suspicious moment at the edge of the summer house when every outraged male instinct in him had leaped to prove that—love or no love—the woman was—his. Up and down,—up and down,—round and round,—eight o'clock found the Senior Surgeon still pacing.

At half past eight the young Wall Paper Man came to say good-by to him.

"As long as Sister won't be alone any more, I guess I'll be moving on," beamed the Wall Paper Man. "There's a dance at home Saturday night. And I've got a girl of my own!" he confided genially.

"Come again," urged the Senior Surgeon. "Come again when you can stay longer!"

With one honest prayer in stock, and at least two purely automatic social speeches of this sort, no man needs to flounder altogether hopelessly for words in any ordinary emergency of life. Thus with no more mental interruption than the two-minute break in time, the Senior Surgeon then resumed his bitter-thoughted pacing.

At nine o'clock, however,—patroling his long rangy book-shelves, he sensed with a very different feeling through his heavy oak door, the soft whirring swish of skirts and the breathy twitter of muffled voices. Faintly to his acute ears came the sound of his little daughter's temperish protest, "I won't! I won't!" and the White Linen Nurse's fervid pleading, "Oh, you must,—you must!" and the Little Girl's mumbled ultimatum, "Well, I won't unless you do!"

Irascibly he crossed the room and yanked the door open abruptly upon their surprise and confusion. His nerves were very sore.

"What in thunder do you want?" he snarled.

Nervously for an instant the White Linen Nurse tugged at the Little Girl's hand. Nervously for an instant the Little Girl tugged at the White Linen Nurse's hand. Then with a swallow like a sob the White Linen Nurse lifted her glowing face to his.

"K—kiss us good night!" said the White Linen Nurse.

Telescopically all in that startling second, vision after vision beat down like blows upon the Senior Surgeon's senses! The pink, pink flush of the girl! The lure of her! The amazing sweetness! The physical docility! Oh ye gods,—the docility! Every trend of her birth,—of her youth,—of her training,—forcing her now—if he chose it—to unquestioning submission to his will and his judgment! Faster and faster the temptation surged through his pulses! The path from her lips to her ear was such a little path,—the plea so quick to make, so short,—"I want you now!"

"K—kiss us good night!" urged the Big Girl's unsuspecting lips. "Kiss us good night!" mocked the Little Girl's tremulous echo.

Then explosively with the noblest rudeness of his life, "No, I won't!" said the Senior Surgeon, and slammed the door in their faces.

Falteringly up the stairs he heard the two ascending,—speechless with surprise, perhaps,—stunned by his roughness,—still hand in hand, probably,—still climbing slowly bed-ward,—the soft, smooth, patient footfall of the White Linen Nurse and the jerky, laborious clang-clang-clang of a little dragging iron-braced leg.

Up and down,—round and round,—on and on and on,—the Senior Surgeon resumed his pacing. Under his eyes great shadows darkened. Along the corners of his mouth the lines furrowed like gray scars. Up and down,—round and round,—on and on and on—and on!

At ten o'clock, sitting bolt upright in her bed with her worried eyes straining bluely out across the Little Girl's somnolent form into unfathomable darkness, the White Linen Nurse in the throb of her own heart began to keep pace with that faint, horrid thud-thud-thud in the room below. Was he passing the book-case now? Had he reached the bay-window? Was he dawdling over those glistening scalpels? Would his nerves remember the flask in that upper desk drawer? Up and down,—round and round,—on and on,—the harrowing sound continued.

Resolutely at last she scrambled out of her snug nest, and hurrying into her great warm, pussy-gray wrapper began at once very practically, very unemotionally, with matches and alcohol and a shiny glass jar to prepare a huge steaming cup of malted milk. Beef-steak was infinitely better, she knew, or eggs, of course, but if she should venture forth to the kitchen for real substantiate the Senior Surgeon, she felt quite positive, would almost certainly hear her and stop her. So very stealthily thus like the proverbial assassin she crept down the front stairs with the innocent malted milk cup in her hand, and then with her knuckles just on the verge of rapping against the grimly inhospitable door, went suddenly paralyzed with uncertainty whether to advance or retreat.

Once again through the sombre inert wainscoting, exactly as if a soul had creaked, the Senior Surgeon sensed the threatening, intrusive presence of an unseen personality. Once again he strode across the room and jerked the door open with terrifying anger and resentment.

As though frozen there on his threshold by Her own little bare feet,—as though strangled there in his doorway by her own great mop of golden hair,—stolid and dumb as a pink-cheeked graven image the White Linen Nurse thrust the cup out awkwardly at him.

Absolutely without comment, as though she trotted on purely professional business and the case involved was of mutual concern to them both, the Senior Surgeon took the cup from her hand and closed the door again in her face.

At eleven o'clock she came again,—just as pink,—just as blue,—just as gray,—just as golden. And the cup of malted milk she brought with her was just as huge,—just as hot,—just as steaming,—only this time she had smuggled two raw eggs into it.

Once more the Senior Surgeon took the cup without comment and shut the door in her face.

At twelve o'clock she came again. The Senior Surgeon was unusually loquacious this time.

"Have you any more malted milk?" he asked tersely.

"Oh, yes, sir!" beamed the White Linen Nurse.

"Go and get it!" said the Senior Surgeon.

Obediently the White Linen Nurse pattered up the stairs and returned with the half depleted bottle. Frankly interested she recrossed the threshold of the room and delivered her glass treasure into the hands of the Senior Surgeon as he stood by his desk. Raising herself to her tiptoes she noted with eminent satisfaction that the three big cups on the other side of the desk had all been drained to their dregs.

Then very bluntly before her eyes the Senior Surgeon took the malted milk bottle and poured its remaining contents out quite wantonly into his waste basket. Then equally bluntly he took the White Linen Nurse by the shoulders and marched her out of the room.

"For God's sake!" he said, "get out of this room! And stay out!"

Bang! the big door slammed behind her. Like a snarling fang the lock bit into its catch.

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. Even just to herself—all alone there in the big black hall, she was perfectly polite. "Y-e-s, sir," she repeated softly.

With a slightly sardonic grin on his face the Senior Surgeon resumed his pacing. Up and down,—round and round,—on and on and on!

At one o'clock in the dull, clammy chill of earliest morning he stopped long enough to light his hearthfire.

At two o'clock he stopped again to pile on a trifle more wood.

At three o'clock he dallied for an instant to close a window. The new day seemed strangely cold.

At four o'clock, dawn the wonder,—the miracle,—the long despaired of,—quickened wanly across the East. Then suddenly,—more like a phosphorescent breeze than a glow, the pale, pale yellow sunshine came wafting through the green gloom of the garden. The vigil was over!

Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White Linen Nurse sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a little gray heap on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human body is not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously through the nerves of his stomach.

"What are you doing here?" he fairly screamed at her.

"Just keeping you company, sir," yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before her hand could reach her mouth again another great childish yawn overwhelmed her. "Just—watching with you, sir," she finished more or less inarticulately.

"Watching with—me?" snarled the Senior Surgeon resentfully. "Why—should—you—watch—with—me?"

Like the frightened flash of a bird the heavy lashes went swooping down across the pink cheeks and lifted as suddenly again. "Because you're my—man!" yawned the White Linen Nurse.

Almost roughly the Senior Surgeon reached down and pulled the White Linen Nurse to her feet.

"God!" said the Senior Surgeon. In his strained, husky voice the word sounded like an oath. Grotesquely a little smile went scudding zig-zag across his haggard face. With an impulse absolutely alien to him he reached out abruptly again and raised the White Linen Nurse's hand to his lips. "'Good God' was what I meant—Miss Malgregor!" he grinned a bit sheepishly.

Quite bruskly then he turned and looked at his watch.

"I'd like my breakfast just as soon now as you can possibly get it!" he ordered peremptorily,—in his own morbid pathological emergency no more stopping to consider the White Linen Nurse's purely normal fatigue, than he in any pathological emergency of hers would have stopped to consider his own comfort,—safety,—or even perhaps, life!

Joyously then like a prisoner just turned loose, he went swinging up the stairs to recreate himself with a smoke and a shave and a great, splashing, cold shower-bath.

Only one thing seemed to really trouble him now. At the top of the stairs he stopped for an instant and cocked his head a bit worriedly towards the drawing-room where from some slow-brightening alcove bird-carol after bird-carol went fluting shrilly up into the morning.

"Is that—those blasted canaries?" he asked briefly.

Very companionably the White Linen Nurse cocked her own towsled head on one side and listened with him for half a moment.

"Only four of them are blasted canaries," she corrected very gently. "The fifth one is a paroquet that I got at a mark-down because it was a widowed bird and wouldn't mate again."

"Eh?" jerked the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse and started for the kitchen.

No one but the Senior Surgeon himself breakfasted in state at five o'clock that morning. Snug and safe in her crib upstairs the Little Crippled Girl slumbered peacefully on through the general disturbance. And as for the White Linen Nurse herself,—what with chilling and rechilling melons,—and broiling and unbroiling steaks,—and making and remaking coffee,—and hunting frantically for a different-sized water glass,—or a prettier colored plate, there was no time for anything except an occasional hurried surreptitious nibble half way between the stove and the table.

Yet in all that raucous early morning hour together neither man nor girl suffered towards the other the slightest personal sense of contrition or resentment, for each mind was trained equally fairly,—whether reacting on its own case or another's—to differentiate pretty readily between mean nerves and a—mean spirit.

Only once in fact across the intervening chasm of crankiness did the Senior Surgeon hurl a smile that was even remotely self-conscious or conciliatory. Glancing up suddenly from a particularly sharp and disagreeable speech, he noted the White Linen Nurse's red lips mumbling softly one to the other.

"Are you specially—religious,—Miss Malgregor?" he grinned quite abruptly.

"No, not specially, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. "Why, sir?"

"Oh, it 's only—" grinned the Senior Surgeon dourly, "it's only that every time I'm especially ugly to you, I see your lips moving as though in 'silent prayer' as they call it—and I was just wondering—if there was any special formula you used with me—that kept you so—everlastingly—damned serene. Is there?"

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.

"What is it?" demanded the Senior Surgeon quite bluntly.

"Do I have to tell?" gasped the White Linen Nurse. A little tremulously in her hand the empty cup she was carrying rattled against its saucer. "Do I have to tell?" she repeated pleadingly.

A delirious little thrill of power went fluttering through the Senior Surgeon's heart.

"Yes, you have to tell me!" he announced quite seriously.

In absolute submission to his demand, though with very palpable reluctance, the White Linen Nurse came forward to the table, put down the cup and saucer, and began to finger a trifle nervously at the cloth.

"Oh, I'm sure I didn't mean any harm, sir," she stammered. "But all I say is,—honest and truly all I say is,—'Bah! He's nothing but a man—nothing but a man—nothing but a man!' over and over and over,—just that, sir!"

Uproariously the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair, and jumped to his feet.

"I guess after all I'll have to let the little kid call you—'Peach'—one day a week!" he acknowledged jocosely.

With infinite seriousness then he tossed back his great splendid head,—shook himself free apparently from all unhappy memories,—and started for his work-room,—a great gorgeously vital, extraordinarily talented, gray-haired boy lusting joyously for his own work and play again—after a month's distressing illness!

From the edge of the hall he turned round and made a really boyish grimace at her.

"Now if I only had the horns or the cloven hoof—that you think I have," he called, "what an easy time I'd make of it, raking over all the letters and ads. that are stacked up on my desk!"

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.

Only once did he come back into the kitchen or dining-room for anything. It was at seven o'clock. And the White Linen Nurse was still washing dishes.

As radiant as a gray-haired god he towered up in the doorway. The boyish rejuvenation in him was even more startling than before.

"I'm feeling so much like a fighting cock this morning," he said, "I think I'll tackle that paper on surgical diseases of the pancreas that I have to read at Baltimore next month!" A little startlingly the gray lines furrowed into his cheeks again. "For Heaven's sake—see that I'm not disturbed by anything!" he admonished her warningly.

It must have been almost eight o'clock when the ear-splitting scream from upstairs sent the White Linen Nurse plunging out panic-stricken into the hall.

"Oh, Peach! Peach!" yelled the Little Girl's frenzied voice. "Come quick and see—what Fat Father's doing now—out on the piazza!"

Jerkily the White Linen Nurse swerved off through the French door that opened directly on the piazza. Had the Senior Surgeon hung himself, she tortured, in some wild, temporary aberration of the "morning after"?

But staunchly and reassuringly from the further end of the piazza the Senior Surgeon's broad back belied her horrid terror. Quite prosily and in apparently perfect health he was standing close to the railing of the piazza. On a table directly beside him rested four empty bird cages. Just at that particular moment he was inordinately busy releasing the last canary from the fifth cage. Both hands were smouched with ink and behind his left ear a fountain pen dallied daringly.

At the very first sound of the White Linen Nurse's step the Senior Surgeon turned and faced her with a sheepish sort of defiance.

"Well, now, I imagine," he said, "well, now, I imagine I've really made you—mad!"

"No, not mad, sir," faltered the White Linen Nurse. "No, not mad, sir,—but very far from well." Coaxingly with a perfectly futile hand she tried to lure one astonished yellow songster back from a swaying yellow bush. "Why, they'll die, sir!" she protested. "Savage cats will get them!"

"It's a choice of their lives—or mine!" said the Senior Surgeon tersely.

"Yes, sir," droned the White Linen Nurse.

Quite snappishly the Senior Surgeon turned upon her. "For Heaven's sake—do you think—canary birds are more valuable than I am?" he demanded stentoriously.

Most disconcertingly before his glowering eyes a great, sad, round tear rolled suddenly down the White Linen Nurse's flushed cheek.

"N—o,—not more valuable," conceded the White Linen Nurse. "But more—c-cunning."

Up to the roots of the Senior Surgeon's hair a flush of real contrition spread hotly.

"Why—Rae!" he stammered. "Why, what a beast I am! Why—! Why!" In sincere perplexity he began to rack his brains for some adequate excuse,—some adequate explanation. "Why, I'm sure I didn't mean to make you feel badly," he persisted. "Only I've lived alone so long that I suppose I've just naturally drifted into the way of having a thing if I wanted it and—throwing it away if I didn't! And canary birds, now? Well—really—" he began to glower all over again. "Oh, thunder!" he finished abruptly, "I guess I'll go on down to the hospital where I belong!"

A little wistfully the White Linen Nurse stepped forward. "The hospital?" she said. "Oh,—the hospital? Do you think that perhaps you could come home a little bit earlier than usual—to-night—and—and help me catch—just one of the canaries?"

"What?" gasped the Senior Surgeon. Incredulously with a very inky finger he pointed at his own breast. "What? I?" he demanded. "I? Come home—early—from the hospital to help—you—catch a canary?"

Disgustedly without further comment he turned and stalked back again into the house.

The disgust was still in his walk as he left the house an hour later. Watching his exit down the long gravel path the Little Crippled Girl commented audibly on the matter.

"Peach! Peach!" called the Little Crippled Girl. "What makes Fat Father walk so—surprised?"

People at the hospital also commented upon him.

"Gee!" giggled the new nurses. "We bet he 's a Tartar! But isn't his hair cute? And say—" gossiped the new nurses, "is it really true that that Malgregor girl was pinned down perfectly helpless under the car and he wouldn't let her out till she'd promised to marry him? Isn't it awful? Isn't it romantic?"

"Why! Dr. Faber 's back!" fluttered the senior nurses. "Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he beautiful? But, oh, say," they worried, "what do you suppose Rae ever finds to talk with him about? Would she ever dare talk things to him,—just plain every-day things,—hats, and going to the theater, and what to have for breakfast?—breakfast?" they gasped. "Why, yes, of course!" they reasoned more sanely. "Steak? Eggs? Even oatmeal? Why, people had to eat—no matter how wonderful they were! But evenings?" they speculated more darkly. "But evenings?" In the whole range of human experience—was it even so much as remotely imaginable that—evenings—the Senior Surgeon and—Rae Malgregor—sat in the hammock and held hands? "Oh, Gee!" blanched the senior nurses.

"Good-morning, Dr. Faber!" greeted the Superintendent of Nurses from behind her austere office desk.

"Good-morning, Miss Hartzen!" said the Senior Surgeon.

"Have you had a pleasant trip?" quizzed the Superintendent of Nurses.

"Exceptionally so, thank you!" said the Senior Surgeon.

"And—Mrs. Faber,—is she well?" persisted the Superintendent of Nurses conscientiously.

"Mrs. Faber?" gasped the Senior Surgeon. "Mrs. Faber? Oh, yes! Why, of course! Yes, indeed—she's extraordinarily well! I never saw her better!"

"She must have been—very lonely without you—this past month?" rasped the Superintendent of Nurses—perfectly politely.

"Yes—she was," flushed the Senior Surgeon. "She—she suffered—keenly!"

"And you, too?" drawled the Superintendent of Nurses. "It must have been very hard for you."

"Yes, it was!" sweated the Senior Surgeon. "I suffered keenly, too!"

Distractedly he glanced back at the open door. An extraordinarily large number of nurses, internes, orderlies, seemed to be having errands up and down the corridor that allowed them a peculiarly generous length of neck to stretch into the Superintendent's office.

"Great Heavens!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "What 's the matter with everybody this morning?" Tempestuously he started for the door. "Hurry up my cases, please, Miss Hartzen!" he ordered. "Send them to the operating room! And let me get to work!"

At eleven o'clock, absolutely calm, absolutely cool,—pure as a girl in his fresh, white operating clothes—cleaner,—skin, hair, teeth, hands,—than any girl who ever walked the face of the earth, in a white tiled room as surgically clean as himself, with three or four small, glistening instruments still boiling, steaming hot—and half a dozen breathless assistants almost as immaculate as himself, with his gown, cap and mask adjusted, his gloves finally on, and the faintest possible little grin twitching oddly at the corner of his mouth, he "went in" as they say, to a new born baby's tortured, twisted spine—and took out—fifty years perhaps of hunched-back pain and shame and morbid passions flourishing banefully in the dark shades of a disordered life.

At half-past twelve he did an appendix operation on the only son of his best friend. At one o'clock he did another appendix operation. Whom it was on didn't matter. It couldn't have been worse on—any one. At half-past one no one remembered to feed him. At two, in another man's operation, he saw the richest merchant in the city go wafted out into eternity on the fumes of ether taken for the lancing of a stye. At three o'clock, passing the open door of one of the public waiting-rooms, an Italian peasant woman rushed out and spat in his face because her tubercular daughter had just died at the sanitarium where the Senior Surgeon's money had sent her. Only in this one wild, defiling moment did the lust for alcohol surge up in him again, surge clamorously, brutally, absolutely mercilessly, as though in all the known cleansants of the world only interminable raw whisky was hot enough to cauterize a polluted consciousness. At half past three, as soon as he could change his clothes again, he re-broke and re-set an acrobat's priceless leg. At five o'clock, more to rest himself than anything else, he went up to the autopsy amphitheater to look over an exhibit of enlarged hearts, whose troubles were permanently over.

At six o'clock just as he was leaving the great building with all its harrowing sights, sounds, and smells, a peremptory telephone call from one of the younger surgeons of the city summoned him back into the stuffy office again.

"Dr. Faber?"

"Yes."

"This is Merkley!"

"Yes."

"Can you come immediately and help me with that fractured skull case I was telling you about this morning? We'll have to trepan right away!"

"Trepan nothing!" grunted the Senior Surgeon. "I've got to go home early to-night—and help catch a canary."

"Catch a—what?" gasped the younger surgeon.

"A canary!" grinned the Senior Surgeon mirthlessly.

"A—what?" roared the younger man.

"Oh, shut up, you damned fool! Of course I'll come!" said the Senior Surgeon.

There was no "boy" left in the Senior Surgeon when he reached home that night.

Gray with road-travel, haggard with strain and fatigue, it was long, long after the rosy sunset time,—long, long after the yellow supper light, that he came dragging up through the sweet-scented dusk of the garden and threw himself down without greeting of any sort on the top step of the piazza where the White Linen Nurse's skirts glowed palely through the gloom.

"Well, I put a canary bird back into its cage for you!" he confided laconically. "It was a little chap's soul. It sure would have gotten away before morning."

"Who was the man that tried to turn it loose—this time?" asked the White Linen Nurse.

"I didn't say that anybody did!" growled the Senior Surgeon.

"Oh," said the White Linen Nurse. "Oh." Quite palpably a little shiver of flesh and starch went rustling through her. "I've had a wonderful day, too!" she confided softly. "I've cleaned the attic and darned nine pairs of your stockings and bought a sewing-machine—and started to make you a white silk negligee shirt for a surprise!"

"Eh?" jerked the Senior Surgeon.

The jerk seemed to liberate suddenly the faint vibration of dishes and the sound of ice knocking lusciously against a glass.

"Oh, have you had any supper, sir?" asked the White Linen Nurse.

With a prodigious sigh the Senior Surgeon threw his head back against the piazza railing and stretched his legs a little further out along the piazza floor.

"Supper?" he groaned. "No! Nor dinner! Nor breakfast! Nor any other—blankety-blank meal as far back as I can remember!" Janglingly in his voice, fatigue, hunger, nerves, crashed together like the slammed notes of a piano. "But I wouldn't—move—now," he snarled, "if all the blankety-blank-blank foods in Christendom—were piled blankety-blank-blank high—on all the blankety-blank-blank tables—in this whole blankety-blank-blank house!"

Ecstatically the White Linen Nurse clapped her hands. "Oh, that's just exactly what I hoped you'd say!" she cried. "'Cause the supper's—right here!"

"Here?" snapped the Senior Surgeon. Tempestuously he began all over again. "I—tell—you—I—wouldn't—lift—my—little finger—if all the blankety-blank-blank-blank—"

"Oh, Goody then!" said the White Linen Nurse. "'Cause now I can feed you! I sort of miss fussing with the canary birds," she added wistfully.

"Feed me?" roared the Senior Surgeon. Again something started a lump of ice tinkling faintly in a thin glass. "Feed me?" he began all over again.

Yet with a fragrant strawberry half as big as a peach held out suddenly under his nose, just from sheer, irresistible instinct he bit out at it—and nipped the White Linen Nurse's finger instead.

"Ouch—sir!" said the White Linen Nurse.

Mumblingly down from an upstairs window, as from a face flatted smouchingly against a wire screen, a peremptory summons issued.

"Peach!—Peach!" called an angry little voice. "If you don't come to bed—now—I'll—I'll say my curses instead of my prayers!"

A trifle nervously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her feet.

"Maybe I'd—better go?" she said.

"Maybe—you had!" said the Senior Surgeon quite definitely.

At the edge of the threshold the White Linen Nurse turned for an instant.

"Good-night, Dr. Faber!" she whispered.

"Good-night, Rae Malgregor—Faber!" said the Senior Surgeon.

"Good-night—what?" gasped the White Linen Nurse.

"Good-night, Rae Malgregor—Faber," repeated the Senior Surgeon.

Clutching at her skirts as though a mouse were after her, the White Linen Nurse went scuttling up the stairs.

Very late—on into the night—the Senior Surgeon lay there on his piazza floor staring out into his garden. Very companionably from time to time, like a tame firefly, a little bright spark hovered and glowed for an instant above the bowl of his pipe. Puff-puff-puff, doze-doze-doze, throb-throb-throb,—on and on and on and on—into the sweet-scented night.



CHAPTER X

So the days passed. And the nights. And more days. And more nights. July—August,—on and on and on.

Strenuous, nerve-racking, heart-breaking surgical days—broken maritally only by the pleasant, soft-worded greeting at the gate, or the practical, homely appeal of good food cooked with heart as well as hands, or the tingling, inciting masculine consciousness of there being a woman's—blush in the house!

Strenuous, house-working, child-nursing, home-making, domestic days—broken maritally only by the jaded, harsh word at the gate, the explosive criticism of food, the deadening, depressing, feminine consciousness of there being a man's—vicious temper in the house!

Now and again in one big automobile or another the White Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon rode out together, always and forever with the Little Crippled Girl sitting between them,—the other woman's little crippled girl. Now and again in the late summer afternoons the White Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon strolled together through the rainbow-colored garden, always and forever with the Little Crippled Girl,—the other woman's little crippled girl, tagging close behind them with her little sad, clanking leg. Now and again in the long sweet summer evenings the White Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon sat on the clematis-shadowed porch together, always and forever with the Little Crippled Girl,—the other woman's little crippled girl, mocking them querulously from some vague upper window.

Now and again across the mutually ghost-haunted chasm that separated them flashed the incontrovertible signal of sex and sense, as once when a new Interne, grossly bungling, stepped to the hospital window with a colleague to watch the Senior Surgeon's car roll away as usual with its two feminine passengers.

"What makes the Chief so stingy with that big handsome girl of his?" queried the new Interne a bit resentfully. "He won't ever bring her into the hospital!—won't ever ask any of us young chaps out to his house! And some of us come mighty near to being eligible, too!—Who's he saving her for, anyway?—A saint?—A miracle-worker?—A millionaire medicine man?—They don't exist, you know!"

"I'm saving her for myself!" snapped the Senior Surgeon most disconcertingly from the doorway. "She—she happens to be my wife, not my daughter,—thank you!"

When the Senior Surgeon went home that night he carried a big bunch of magazines and a box of candy as large as his head tucked courtingly under his arm.

Now and again across the chasm that separated them flashed the incontrovertible signal of mutual trust and appreciation, as when once, after a particularly violent vocal outburst on the Senior Surgeon's part, he sobered down very suddenly and said:

"Rae Malgregor,—do you realize that in all the weeks we've been together you've never once nagged me about my swearing? Not a word,—not a single word!"

"I'm not very used to—words," smiled the White Linen Nurse hopefully. "All I know how to nag with is—is raw eggs! If we could only get those nerves of yours padded just once, sir! The swearing would get well of itself."

In August the Senior Surgeon suggested sincerely that the house was much too big for the White Linen Nurse to run all alone, but conceded equally sincerely, under the White Linen Nurse's vehement protest, that servants, particularly new servants did creak considerably round a house, and that maybe "just for the present" at least, until he finished his very nervous paper on brain tumors perhaps it would be better to stay "just by ourselves."

In September the White Linen Nurse wanted very much to go home to Nova Scotia to her sister's wedding but the Senior Surgeon was trying a very complicated and worrisome new brace on the Little Girl's leg and it didn't seem quite kind to go. In October she planned her trip all over again. She was going to take the Little Crippled Girl with her this time. But with their trunks already packed and waiting in the hall, the Senior Surgeon came home from the hospital with a septic finger—and it didn't seem quite best to leave him.

"Well, how do you like being married now?" asked the Senior Surgeon a bit ironically in his work-room that night, after the White Linen Nurse had stood for an hour with evil-smelling washes, and interminable bandages trying to fix that finger the precise, particular way that he thought it ought to be fixed. "Well—how do you like—being married now?" he insisted trenchantly.

"Oh, I like it all right, sir!" said the White Linen Nurse. A little bit wanly this time she smiled her pluck up into the Senior Surgeon's questioning face. "Oh, I like it all right, sir! Oh, of course, sir," she confided thoughtfully—"Oh, of course, sir—it isn't quite as fancy as being engaged—or quite as free and easy as being—single. But still—" she admitted with desperate honesty—"but still there's a sort of—a sort of a combination importance and—and comfort about it, sir, like a—like a velvet suit—the second year, sir."

"Is that—all?" quizzed the Senior Surgeon bluntly.

"That's all—so far, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.

In November the White Linen Nurse caught a bit of cold that pulled her down a little. But the Senior Surgeon didn't notice it specially among all the virulent ills he lived and worked with from day to day. And then when the cold disappeared, Indian Summer came like a reeking sweat after a chill! And the house was big! And the Little Crippled Girl was pretty difficult to manage now and then! And the Senior Surgeon, no matter how hard he tried not to, did succeed somehow in creating more or less of a disturbance—at least every other day or two!

And then suddenly, one balmy gold and crimson Indian Summer morning, standing out on the piazza trying to hear what the Little Crippled Girl was calling from the window and what the Senior Surgeon was calling from the gate, the White Linen Nurse fell right down in her tracks, brutally, bulkily, like a worn-out horse, and lay as she fell, a huddled white heap across the gray piazza.

"Oh, Father! Come quick! Come quick! Peach has deaded herself!" yelled the Little Girl's frantic voice.

Just with his foot on the step of his car the Senior Surgeon heard the cry and came speeding back up the long walk. Already there before him the Little Girl knelt raining passionate, agonized kisses on her beloved playmate's ghastly white face.

"Leave her alone!" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "Leave her alone, I say!"

Bruskly he pushed the Little Girl aside and knelt to cradle his own ear against the White Linen Nurse's heart.

"Oh, it's all right," he growled, and gathered the White Linen Nurse right up in his arms—she was startlingly lighter than he had supposed—and carried her up the stairs and put her to bed like a child in the great sumptuous guest-room, in a great sumptuous nest of all the best linens and blankets, with the Little Crippled Girl superintending the task with many hysterical suggestions and sharp staccato interruptions. For once in his life the Senior Surgeon did not stop to quarrel with his daughter.

Rallying limply from her swoon the White Linen Nurse stared out with hazy perplexity at last from her dimpling white pillows to see the Senior Surgeon standing amazingly at the guest-room bureau with a glass and a medicine-dropper in his hand, and the Little Crippled Girl hanging apparently by her narrow peaked chin across the foot-board of the bed.

Gazing down worriedly at the lace-ruffled sleeve of her night-dress the White Linen Nurse made her first public speech to the—world at large.

"Who—put—me—to—bed?" whispered the White Linen Nurse.

Ecstatically the Little Crippled Girl began to pound her fists on the foot-board of the bed.

"Father did!" she cried in unmistakable triumph. "All the little hooks! All the little buttons!—wasn't it cunning?"

The Senior Surgeon would hardly have been human if he hadn't glanced back suddenly over his shoulder at the White Linen Nurse's precipitously changing color. Quite irrepressibly, as he saw the red, red blood come surging home again into her cheeks, a little short chuckling laugh escaped him.

"I guess you'll live—now," he remarked dryly.

Then because a Senior Surgeon can't stay home on the mere impulse of the moment from a great rushing hospital, just because one member of his household happens to faint perfectly innocently in the morning, he hurried on to his work again. And saved a little boy, and lost a little girl, and mended a fractured thigh, and eased a gun-shot wound, and came dashing home at noon in one of his thousand-dollar hours to feel the White Linen Nurse's pulse and broil her a bit of tenderloin steak with his own thousand-dollar hands,—and then went dashing off again to do one major operation or another, telephoned home once or twice during the afternoon to make sure that everything was all right, and finding that the White Linen Nurse was comfortably up and about again, went sprinting off fifty miles somewhere on a meningitis consultation, and came dragging home at last, somewhere near midnight, to a big black house brightened only by a single light in the kitchen where the White Linen Nurse went tiptoeing softly from stove to pantry in deft preparation of an appetizing supper for him.

Quite roughly again without smile or appreciation the Senior Surgeon took her by the shoulders and turned her out of the kitchen, and started her up the stairs.

"Are you an—idiot?" he said. "Are you an—imbecile?" he came back and called up the stairs to her just as she was disappearing from the upper landing.

Then up and down, round and round, on and on and on, the Senior Surgeon began suddenly to pace again.

Only, for some unexplainable reason to the White Linen Nurse upstairs, his work-room didn't seem quite large enough for his pacing this night Along the broad piazza she heard his footsteps creak. Far, far into the morning, lying warm and snug in her own little bed, she heard his footsteps crackling through the wet-leafed garden paths.

Yet the Senior Surgeon didn't look an atom jaded or forlorn when he came down to breakfast the next morning. He had on a brand new gray suit that fitted his big, powerful shoulders to perfection, and the glad glow of his shower-bath was still reddening faintly in his cheeks as he swung around the corner of the table and dropped down into his place with an odd little grin on his lips directed intermittently towards the White Linen Nurse and the Little Crippled Girl who already waited him there at either end of the table.

"Oh, Father, isn't it lovely to have my darling—darling Peach all well again!" beamed the Little Crippled Girl with unusual friendliness.

"Speaking of your—'darling Peach,'" said the Senior Surgeon quite abruptly. "Speaking of your 'darling Peach,'—I'm going to—take her away with me to-day—for a week or so."

"Eh?" jumped the Little Crippled Girl.

"What? What, sir?" stammered the White Linen Nurse.

Quite prosily the Senior Surgeon began to butter a piece of toast. But the little twinkle around his eyes belied in some way the utter prosiness of the act.

"For a little trip," he confided amiably. "A little holiday!"

A trifle excitedly the White Linen Nurse laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, blue-eyed and wondering as a child.

"A holiday?" she gasped. "To a—beach, you mean? Would there be a—a roller-coaster? I've never seen a roller-coaster!"

"Eh?" laughed the Senior Surgeon.

"Oh, I'm going, too! I'm going, too!" piped the Little Crippled Girl.

Most jerkily the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair from the table and swallowed half a cup of coffee at one single gulp.

"Going three, you mean?" he glowered at his little daughter. "Going three?" His comment that ensued was distinctly rough as far as diction was concerned, but the facial expression of ineffable peace that accompanied it would have made almost any phrase sound like a benediction. "Not by a—damned sight!" beamed the Senior Surgeon. "This little trip is just for Peach and me!"

"But—sir?" fluttered the White Linen Nurse. Her face was suddenly pinker than any rose that ever bloomed.

With an impulse absolutely novel to him the Senior Surgeon turned and swung his little daughter very gently to his shoulder.

"Your Aunt Agnes is coming to stay with you—in just about ten minutes!" he affirmed. "That's—what's going to happen to you! And maybe there'll be a pony—a white pony."

"But Peach is so—pleasant!" wailed the Little Crippled Girl. "Peach is so pleasant!" she began to scream and kick.

"So it seems!" growled the Senior Surgeon. "And she's—dying of it!"

Tearfully the Little Girl wriggled down to the ground, and hobbled around and thrust her finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse's blushiest cheek.

"I don't want—Peach—to—die," she admitted worriedly. "But I don't want anybody to take her away!"

"The pony is—very white," urged the Senior Surgeon with a diplomacy quite alien to him.

Abruptly the Little Girl turned and faced him. "What color is Aunt Agnes?" she asked vehemently.

"Aunt Agnes is—pretty white, too," attested the Senior Surgeon.

With the faintest possible tinge of superciliousness the Little Girl lifted her sharp chin a trifle higher.

"If it's just a perfectly plain white pony," she said, "I'd rather have Peach. But if it's a white pony with black blots on it, and if it can pull a little cart, and if I can whip it with a little switch, and if it will eat sugar-lumps out of my hand,—and if its name is—is—'Beautiful Pretty-Thing'—"

"Its name has always been—'Beautiful Pretty-Thing,' I'm quite sure!" insisted the Senior Surgeon. Inadvertently as he spoke he reached out and put a hand very lightly on the White Linen Nurse's shoulder.

Instantly into the Little Girl's suspicious face flushed a furiously uncontrollable flame of jealousy and resentment. Madly she turned upon her father.

"You're a liar!" she screamed. "There is no white pony! You're a robber! You're a—a—drunk! You shan't have my darling Peach!" And threw herself frenziedly into the White Linen Nurse's lap.

Impatiently the Senior Surgeon disentangled the little clinging arms, and raising the White Linen Nurse to her feet pushed her emphatically towards the hall.

"Go to my work-room," he said. "Quickly! I want to talk with you!"

A moment later he joined her there, and shut and locked the door behind him. The previous night's loss of sleep showed plainly in his face now, and the hospital strain of the day before, and of the day before that, and of the day before that.

Heavily, moodily, he crossed the room and threw himself down in his desk chair with the White Linen Nurse still standing before him as though she were nothing but a—white linen nurse. All the splendor was suddenly gone from him, all the radiance, all the exultant purpose.

"Well, Rae Malgregor," he grinned mirthlessly. "The little kid is right, though I certainly don't know where she got her information. I am a Liar. The pony's name is not yet 'Beautiful Pretty-Thing'! I am a—Drunk. I was drunk most of June! I am a Robber! I have taken you out of your youth—and the love-chances of your youth,—and shut you up here in this great, gloomy old house of mine—to be my slave—and my child's slave—and—"

"Pouf!" said the White Linen Nurse. "It would seem—silly—now, sir,—to marry a boy!"

"And I've been a beast to you!" persisted the Senior Surgeon. "From the very first day you belonged to me I've been a—beast to you,—venting brutally on your youth, on your sweetness, on your patience,—all the work, the worry, the wear and tear, the abnormal strain and stress of my disordered days—and years,—and I've let my little girl vent also on you all the pang and pain of her disordered days! And because in this great, gloomy, rackety house it seemed suddenly like a miracle from heaven to have service that was soft-footed, gentle-handed, pleasant-hearted, I've let you shoulder all the hideous drudgery,—the care,—one horrid homely task after another piling up-up-up—till you dropped in your tracks yesterday—still smiling!"

"But I got a good deal out of it, even so, sir!" protested the White Linen Nurse. "See, sir!" she smiled. "I've got real lines in my face—now—like other women! I'm not a doll any more! I'm not a—"

"Yes!" groaned the Senior Surgeon. "And I might just as kindly have carved those lines with my knife! But I was going to make it all up to you to-day!" he hurried. "I swear I was! Even in one short little week I could have done it! You wouldn't have known me! I was going to take you away,—just you and me! I would have been a Saint! I swear I would! I would have given you such a great, wonderful, child-hearted holiday—as you never dreamed of in all your unselfish life! A holiday all you—you—you! You could have—dug in the sand if you'd wanted to! Gad! I'd have dug in the sand—if you'd wanted me to! And now it's all gone from me, all the will, all the sheer positive self-assurance that I could have carried the thing through—absolutely selflessly. That little girl's sneering taunt? The ghost of her mother—in that taunt? God! When anybody knocks you just in your decency it doesn't harm you specially! But when they knock you in your Wanting-To-Be-Decent it—it undermines you somewhere. I don't know exactly how! I'm nothing but a man again—now, just a plain, every day, greedy, covetous, physical man—on the edge of a holiday, the first clean holiday in twenty years,—that he no longer dares to take!"