"It's in a top flat."
"I dare say I could manage," she said, still hesitating.
Roger, remembering suddenly that Pollock had a married sister, vowed that another lady would be there a good deal in the daytime. She weighed this fact as she stood by the door of the cupboard about to take her hat.
"I don't think I should care to do it," she said suddenly. "I've not been used to that class of work."
Turning at the door as he went out, he saw that she was watching him with a faint smile. Only the hospital remained.
It took him a long way out of his way. It was twenty past nine when he reached the hospital. Very soon it would be too late for Ottalie. His heart sank. He believed in telepathy. He was thinking so fixedly on Ottalie that he believed that she must sense his thought. "Ottalie, Ottalie," he kept saying to himself. "Wait for me. Wait for me. I shall come. I am coming as fast as I can. Can't you feel me hurrying to you? Wait for me. Don't let me miss you." He discharged his horse-cab, and engaged a motor-cab. Two minutes later he had engaged a nurse. She was in the cab with him. They were whirling south.
"No," she was telling him. "I don't find much difference in my cases. I don't generally see them after. Some are more interesting than others. I like being with an interesting case. I don't mean to say a serious case, and have either of them die, and that. I mean, you know, out of the usual. That's why I like having to do with a first child."
She asked if there were any chance of her being too late. Roger, with his heart full of Ottalie, could not tell her.
"I shouldn't like to be too late," she said. "I've never missed a case yet. Never. I should be vexed if I were too late with this one. It's a painter gentleman, I think you said it was?"
"Yes."