Impishly like a child, muscularly like a man, the Senior Surgeon clutched out at the flapping corner of her coat.
“No, you don’t,” he laughed, “till you’ve given me my definite answer, yes or no.”
Breathlessly the White Linen Nurse spun round in her tracks. Her breast was heaving with ill-suppressed sobs, her eyes were blurred with tears.
“You’ve no business to hurry me so,” she protested passionately. “It isn’t fair; it isn’t kind.”
Sluggishly in the Senior Surgeon’s jolted arms the Little Girl woke from her feverish nap and peered up perplexedly through the gray dusk into her father’s face.
“Where’s my kitty?” she asked hazily.
“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.
Harshly the little iron leg-braces clanked together. In an instant the White Linen Nurse was on her knees in the grass.
“You don’t hold her right, sir,” she expostulated. Deftly, with soft, darting little touches, interrupted only by rubbing her knuckles into her own tears, she reached out and eased successively the bruise of a buckle or the dragging weight on a cramped little hip.
Still drowsily, still hazily, with little smacking gasps and gulping swallows, the child worried her way back again into consciousness.