"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.