Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon’s temper began to search for a new point of exit. “What do you suppose the servants think of you?” he stormed, “running round like that, with your hair in a pigtail, like a kid?” “Servants?” cooed the White Linen Nurse. “Servants?” Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon’s hectic face. “Why, there aren’t any servants,” she explained patiently. “I’ve dismissed every one of them. We’re doing our own work now.” “Doing ’our own work?’” gasped the Senior Surgeon. Worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little. “Why, wasn’t that right?” she pleaded. “Wasn’t it _right_? Why, I thought people always did their own work when they were first married.” With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock, and, darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a fierce-looking knife. [Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson “‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ HE FAIRLY SCREAMED AT HER. ‘JUST KEEPING YOU COMPANY, SIR,’ YAWNED THE WHITE LINEN NURSE” DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER] “I’m so late now, and everything,” she confided, “could you peel the potatoes for me?” “No, I couldn’t,” said the Senior Surgeon, shortly. Equally shortly he turned on his heel, and, reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip, went on up the stairs to his own room. One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the sound of _other_ people getting supper. Stretched out at full length in a big easy-chair by his bedroom window, with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new “solid-gold bed” and his new sage-green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the faint, far-away accompaniment of soft-thudding feet and a girl’s laugh and a child’s prattle and the _tink, tink, tinkle_ of glass, china, silver,--all scurrying consciously to the service of one man, and that man himself. Very, very slowly, in that special half-hour an inscrutable little smile printed itself experimentally across the right-hand corner of the Senior Surgeon’s upper lip. While that smile was still in its infancy, he jumped up suddenly and forced his way across the hall to his dead wife’s room,--the one ghost-room of his house and his life,--and there, with his hand on the turning door-knob, tense with reluctance, goose-fleshed with strain, his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one word, “Alice!” And, behold! there was no room there!