Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and his heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long, broad gravel path to the house. For a man walking as slow as he was, his heart was beating most extraordinarily fast. He was not accustomed to heart-palpitation. The symptom worried him a trifle. Incidentally, also, his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of June. Close at his right, an effulgent white-and-gold syringa-bush flaunted its cloying sweetness into his senses. Close at his left, a riotous bloom of phlox clamored red-blue-purple-lavender-pink into his dazzled vision. Multicolored pansies tiptoed velvet-footed across the grass. In soft, murky mystery a flame-tinted smoke-tree loomed up here and there like a faintly rouged ghost. Over everything, under everything, through everything, lurked a certain strange, novel, vibrating consciousness of occupancy--bees in the rose-bushes, bobolinks in the trees, a woman’s work-basket in the curve of the hammock, a doll’s tea-set sprawling cheerfully in the middle of the broad gravel path. It was not until the Senior Surgeon had actually stepped into the tiny cream-pitcher that he noticed the presence of the doll’s tea-set. It was what the Senior Surgeon said as he stepped out of the cream-pitcher that summoned the amazing apparition from a ragged, green hole in the privet hedge. Startlingly white, startlingly professional,--dress, cap, apron, and all,--a miniature white linen nurse sprang suddenly out at him like a tricky dwarf in a moving-picture show. Just at that particular moment the Senior Surgeon’s nerves were in no condition to wrestle with apparitions. Simultaneously, as the clumsy rod-case dropped from his hand, the expression of enthusiasm dropped from the face of the miniature white linen nurse. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear! have _you_ come home!” wailed the familiar, shrill little voice. Sheepishly the Senior Surgeon picked up his rod-case. The noises in his head were crashing like cracked bells. Desperately, with a boisterous irritability, he sought to cover also the lurching _pound, pound, pound_ of his heart. “What in hell are you rigged out like that for?” he demanded stormily. With equal storminess the Little Girl protested the question. “Peach said I could,” she attested passionately. “Peach said I could, she did! She did! I tell you, I didn’t want her to marry us that day. I was afraid, I was. I cried, I did. I had a convulsion; they thought it was stockings. So Peach said, if it would make me feel any gooderer, I could be the cruel new stepmother, and _she’d_ be the unloved offspring, with her hair braided all yellow fluffikins down her back.” “Where _is_--Miss Malgregor?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sharply. Irrelevantly the Little Girl sank down on the gravel walk and began to gather up her scattered dishes.