“Think you better?”
“Why not?”
“The newspapers called it a ‘mystery,’ you know,” he explained. “They’ll probably be inquisitive. They might get your name.”
“What do I care?” she cried. “Do you think I’d let that stop me from asking him to forgive me?”
“So?” the doctor said, looking at her twinklingly. “So that’s why you want to see him?”
She stared, not understanding his humorous allusion. “Why, what else could I do?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “I was only thinking I’d heard that a good many young ladies were anxious to make his acquaintance. I imagine you’ll be the first, my dear.”
“Well, oughtn’t I to be?” she demanded. “If you’d done as terrible a thing as that to anybody, wouldn’t you think you were entitled to ask his pardon about as soon as he was able to listen?”
“Without doubt. In the meantime I think you’d better go home and to bed again.”
She protested, but proved meeker under advice than she had the night before. She went home, though not directly, for she stopped half an hour at some greenhouses that were a mile out of her way. She sent to Mr. James Herbert McArdle at the hospital a prodigious sheaf of flowers—enough to cripple her rather moderate monthly allowance from her father—and the following morning, since the allowance was already so far gone, she did the same thing. Having thus fallen into the habit, she was as lavish upon the third morning after the accident, so that at three o’clock of this same day, when Doctor Waite took her into his patient’s room, he seemed to be conducting her into a conservatory.