It must have been almost eight o’clock when the ear-splitting scream from up-stairs sent the White Linen Nurse plunging out panic-stricken into the hall.
“Oh, Peach! Peach!” yelled the Little Girl’s frenzied voice, “come quick and see what Fat Father’s doing now, out on the piazza!”
Jerkily the White Linen Nurse swerved off through the French door that opened directly on the piazza. Had the Senior Surgeon hanged himself, she tortured, in some wild, temporary aberration of the “morning after”?
But stanchly and reassuringly from the farther end of the piazza the Senior Surgeon’s broad back belied her horrid terror. Quite prosily and in apparently perfect health he was standing close to the railing of the piazza. On a table directly beside him rested four empty bird-cages. Just at that particular moment he was inordinately busy releasing the last canary from the fifth cage. Both hands were smouched with ink, and behind his left ear a fountain-pen dallied daringly.
At the very first sound of the White Linen Nurse’s step the Senior Surgeon turned and faced her with a sheepish sort of defiance.
“Well, now, I imagine,” he said—“well, now I imagine I’ve really made you mad.”
“No, not mad, sir,” faltered the White Linen Nurse—“no, not mad, sir, but very far from well.” Coaxingly, with a perfectly futile hand, she tried to lure one astonished yellow songster back from a swaying yellow bush. “Why, they’ll die, sir!” she protested. “Savage cats will get them.”
“It’s a choice of their lives or mine,” said the Senior Surgeon, tersely.
“Yes, sir,” droned the White Linen Nurse.
Quite snappishly the Senior Surgeon turned upon her.