From a scene in her room with her two room-mates, in which confidences are exchanged, she rushed to the office of the Superintendent of Nurses, and hysterically demanded her own face. The Senior Surgeon was sent for, and after tartly telling the girl she was a fool, finally took her with him and his little crippled daughter for a thirty-mile trip into the country, where he had been summoned on a difficult case. On their return, the Senior Surgeon lost control of the machine on a steep hill, and the three were thrown out. On recovering consciousness, the White Linen Nurse and the Child find the Senior Surgeon pinned under their motor-car, and after receiving instructions as to its management, the Nurse runs the car into a brook, and the Senior Surgeon becomes aware for the first time that the car is afire. Momentarily unnerved by the thought of the peril in which he has been, the Senior Surgeon clings to the White Linen Nurse, and finally proposes that, since she has decided to give up professional nursing, she take up General Heartwork for him and his daughter. The proposal is in fact a proposal of marriage, and after a frank discussion of the situation (which is one of the most significant and powerful pieces of work of the author), the White Linen Nurse accepts. In the course of the discussion the Senior Surgeon confesses an inherited tendency for drink, and adds that he leaves liquor alone for eleven months in the year, but always goes off to Canada every June for a hunting-trip, on which he drinks heavily. She insists that he go this year and that they marry before his departure, and not on his return, as he wishes. She wins her way, and the Senior Surgeon goes alone. Disquieting letters from her recall him before the end of the month. Nobody looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn’t. Heavily, as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling shadows circled. Behind his sunburn, deeper than his tan, something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul. Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake-time the previous evening. Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil, the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day’s breeze. Blue with cold, a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine-tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. As monotonous as a sob, the waiting birch canoe _slosh-sloshed_ against the beach.