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.
Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin; then equally impulsively the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was clumsy? Eh? Resentfully he stared down at his hands, those wonderfully dexterous, yes, ambidexterous, hands that were the aching envy of all his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared, the voice of the young Wall-Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway.
“Supper’s all ready, sir!” came the clear, cordial summons.
For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment almost nothing in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than to be invited to his own supper, in his own house, by a stranger. Fuming with a new sense of injury and injustice, he started heavily down the stairs to the dining-room.