Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White Linen Nurse, sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a gray little heap on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human body is not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously through the nerves of his stomach.
“What are you doing here?” he fairly screamed at her.
“Just keeping you company, sir,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before her hand could reach her mouth again, another great childish yawn overwhelmed her. “Just—watching with you, sir,” she finished more or less inarticulately.
“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 zigzag 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, perhaps, even life.