"Watching with—me?" snarled the Senior Surgeon resentfully.
"Why—should—you—watch—with—me?"
Like the frightened flash of a bird the heavy lashes went swooping down across the pink cheeks and lifted as suddenly again. "Because you're my—man!" yawned the White Linen Nurse.
Almost roughly the Senior Surgeon reached down and pulled the White
Linen Nurse to her feet.
"God!" said the Senior Surgeon. In his strained, husky voice the word sounded like an oath. Grotesquely a little smile went scudding zig-zag across his haggard face. With an impulse absolutely alien to him he reached out abruptly again and raised the White Linen Nurse's hand to his lips. "'Good God' was what I meant—Miss Malgregor!" he grinned a bit sheepishly.
Quite bruskly then he turned and looked at his watch.
"I'd like my breakfast just as soon now as you can possibly get it!" he ordered peremptorily,—in his own morbid pathological emergency no more stopping to consider the White Linen Nurse's purely normal fatigue, than he in any pathological emergency of hers would have stopped to consider his own comfort,—safety,—or even perhaps, life!
Joyously then like a prisoner just turned loose, he went swinging up the stairs to recreate himself with a smoke and a shave and a great, splashing, cold shower-bath.
Only one thing seemed to really trouble him now. At the top of the stairs he stopped for an instant and cocked his head a bit worriedly towards the drawing-room where from some slow-brightening alcove bird-carol after bird-carol went fluting shrilly up into the morning.
"Is that—those blasted canaries?" he asked briefly.
Very companionably the White Linen Nurse cocked her own towsled head on one side and listened with him for half a moment.