“For Heaven’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he asked—“for Heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell me that the Wall-Paper Man was your brother?”
Very contritely the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress, and as bashfully as a child one finger came stealing up to the edge of her red, red lips.
“I was afraid you’d think I was—cheeky, having any of my family come and live with us so soon,” she murmured almost inaudibly.
“Well, what did you think I’d think you were if he wasn’t your brother?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sardonically.
“Very economical, I hoped,” beamed the White Linen Nurse.
“All the same,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, with an irrelevance surprising even to himself—“all the same, do you think it sounds quite right and proper for a child to call her stepmother ’Peach’?”
Again the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress.
“I don’t suppose it is usual,” she admitted reluctantly. “The children next door, I notice, call theirs ’Crosspatch.’”
With a gesture of impatience, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the steps, yanked open the old-fashioned shuttered door, and burst quite breathlessly and unprepared upon his most amazingly reconstructed house. All in one single second chintzes, muslins, pale blond maples, riotous canary-birds stormed revolutionarily upon his outraged eyes. Reeling back utterly aghast before the sight, he stood there staring dumbly for an instant at what he considered, and rightly too, the absolute wreck of his black-walnut home.