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.