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.