He had been waiting, it seems, on the day of the discovery, an interminably long time in the doctor's office. All around him, in the dinginess and general irritability of such an occasion, loomed the bulky shapes of other patients who like himself had also been waiting interminable eons of time. Everybody was very cross. And it was snowing outside,—one of those dirty gray late-winter snows that don't seem really necessary.
And when She came! Just a girl's laugh at first from the street door! An impish prance of feet down the dark, unaccustomed hallway! A little trip on the threshold! And then personified—laughing—blushing, stumbling fairly headlong at last into the room—the most radiantly lovely young girl that you have ever had the grace to imagine, dangling exultantly from each frost-pinked hand a very large, wriggly, and exceedingly astonished rabbit.
"Oh, Uncle Charles!" she began, "s-ee what I've found! And in an ash-barrel, too! In—a—" She blinked the snow from her lashes, took a sudden startled glance round the room, another at the clock, and collapsed with confusion into the first chair that she could reach.
A very tall "little girl" she was, and very young, not a day more than eighteen surely. And even in the encompassing bulk of her big coon-skin coat with its broad arms hugging the brown rabbits to her breast she gave an impression of extraordinary slimness and delicacy, an impression accentuated perhaps by a slender silk-stockinged ankle, the frilly cuff of a white sleeve, and the aura of pale gold hair that radiated in every direction from the brim of her coon- skin hat. For fully fifteen minutes my Husband said she sat huddled-up in all the sweet furry confusion of a young animal, till driven apparently by that very confusion to essay some distinctly normal-appearing, every-day gesture, she reached out impulsively to the reading table and picked up a book which some young man had just relinquished rather suddenly at a summons to the doctor's inner office. Relaxing ever so slightly into the depths of her chair with the bunnies' noses twinkling contentedly to the rhythm of her own breathing, she made a wonderful picture, line, color, spirit, everything of Youth. Reading, with that strange, extra, inexplainable touch of the sudden little pucker in the eyebrows, sheer intellectual perplexity was in that pucker!
But when the young man returned from the inner office he did not leave at once as every cross, irritable person in the room hoped that he would, but fidgeted around instead with hat and coat, stamped up and down crowding other people's feet, and elbowing other people's elbows. With a gaspy glance at his watch he turned suddenly on the girl with the rabbits. "Excuse me," he floundered, "but I have to catch a train— please may I have my book?"
"Your book?" deprecated the Girl. Confusion anew overwhelmed her! "Your—book? Why, I beg your pardon! Why—why—" Pink as a rose she slammed the covers and glanced for the first time at the title. The title of the book was "What Every Young Husband Should Know." . . . With a sigh like the sigh of a breeze in the ferns the tension of the room relaxed! A very fat, cross-looking woman in black satin ripped audibly at a side seam. . . . A frail old gentleman who really had very few laughs left, wasted one of them in the smothering depths of his big black-bordered handkerchief. . . . The lame newsboy on the stool by the door emitted a single snort of joy. Then the doctor himself loomed suddenly from the inner office, and started right through everybody to the girl with the rabbits. "Why, May," he laughed, "I told you not to get here till four o'clock!"
"Oh, not May?" I protested to my Husband. "It simply couldn't be! Not really?"
"Yes, really," affirmed my Husband. "Isn't it the limit? But wait till you hear the rest! She's Dr. Brawne's ward, it seems, and has been visiting him for the winter. . . . Comes from some little place way off somewheres. . . . And she's got one of those sweet, clear, absolutely harrowing 'boy soprano' types of voices that sound like incense and altar lights even in rag-time. But weirder than any thing—" triumphed my Husband.
"Oh, not than 'anything'?" I gasped.
"But weirder than anything," persisted my Husband, "is the curious way she's marked."