“It's absurd, isn't it?” she cried. “But it's just like Red. Ellen knows that, don't you, dear? Ellen'll not only take him for better and for worse, but for present and for absent—mostly absent! But we're rather proud of him over at the house. Father's walking up and down and saying no other fellow would have done it, and Mother's all tearful and smiling. Dick wanted to go in with him, but of course Miss Mathewson had to go: he seldom operates without her.”
“It's so uncertain when he'll get back,” mourned Martha, still unreconciled.
“I made Miss Mathewson promise to telephone, the moment she should know. It's lucky the wedding guests are all in the family, isn't it? Ellen, dear”—pretty Anne ran up the stairs to the landing—“I really don't see how, after he caught sight of you in that fascinating garb, with your hair down, he could ever tear himself away! You're positively the loveliest thing I ever saw in all my life, and I'm almost out of my senses with joy that you're to be my sister, even though I never saw you in the world till yesterday! I always said when Red did care for anybody for keeps, she'd be a jewel!”
Red Pepper came back at precisely twenty minutes of three. His patient had given him a bad hour of anxiety immediately after leaving the table, and he could not desert her until she had rallied. But he felt easy about her now, and he had arranged to leave her in Buller's hands—Buller, who did not do major surgery himself, but was a most competent man when it came to the care of surgical patients after operation. Burns brought Amy Mathewson back with him, though she had begged to be allowed to stay with the case.
“And not be at my wedding?” cried Red Pepper, in exuberant spirits. “Why, I couldn't be properly married without you to see me through!”
Upon which she had smiled and obeyed him, and taken a tighter grip upon herself as he put her into the Green Imp for the last ride together. That was what it was to her, though she might yet go with him a thousand times to help him in his work. To him it was a quick and joyful journey back to his marriage.
“All right, Mother and Dad!” he exulted, coming in upon them in their festal array. He shook hands with his father and his brother-in-law; he kissed his mother. Then he ran for his own room where Bobby Burns, just being finished off by Anne, herself superbly dressed, shrieked with rapture at the sight of him.
“Red! At last! I've laid everything ready; you've only to jump into your bath; I turned on the water when Dick saw the Imp down the road. Don't you dare have a vestige of a surgical odour about you when you come out!”
In precisely seventeen minutes and three-quarters the bridegroom was ready to the last coppery affair on his head.
“Have I a 'surgical odour,' Anne?” he asked as he came up to her.