Quite ingenuously the White Linen Nurse met and parried the glare.
“A gentleman, and a red-haired kiddie, and a great walloping house all at once, it’s too much,” she confided genially. “Thank you just the same, but I’d rather take them gradually. First of all, sir, you see, I’ve got to teach the little kiddie to like me. And then there’s a green-tiled paper with floppity sea-gulls on it that I want to try for the bath-room. And—and—” Ecstatically she clapped her hands together. “Oh, sir, there are such loads and loads of experiments I want to try while you are off on your spree!”
“’S-h-h!” cried the Senior Surgeon. His face was suddenly blanched, his mouth twitching like the mouth of one stricken with almost insupportable pain. “For God’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he pleaded, “can’t you call it my Canadian trip?”
Wider and wider the White Linen Nurse opened her big blue eyes at him.
“But it is a spree, sir!” she protested resolutely. “And my father says—” Still resolutely her young mouth curved to its original assertion, but from under her heavy-shadowing eyelashes a little smile crept softly out—“when my father’s got a lame trotting-horse, sir, that he’s trying to shuck off his hands,” she faltered, “he doesn’t ever go round mournful-like, with his head hanging, telling folks about his wonderful trotter that’s just ‘the littlest, teeniest, tiniest bit lame.’ Oh, no. What father does is to call up every one he knows within twenty miles and tell ’em: ‘Say, Tom, Bill, Harry, or whatever your name is, what in the deuce do you suppose I’ve got over here in my barn? A lame horse that wants to trot! Lamer than the deuce, you know, but can do a mile in two forty.’” Faintly the little smile quickened again in the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “And the barn will be full of men in half an hour,” she said. “Somehow nobody wants a trotter that’s lame, but almost anybody seems willing to risk a lame horse that’s plucky enough to trot.”
“What’s the ‘lame trotting-horse’ got to do with me?” snarled the Senior Surgeon, incisively.
Darkly the White Linen Nurse’s lashes fringed down across her cheeks.
“Nothing much,” she said; “only—”
“Only what?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. A little more roughly than he realized he stooped down and took the White Linen Nurse by her shoulders, and jerked her sharply round to the light. “Only what?” he insisted peremptorily.
Almost plaintively she lifted her eyes to his.