Lurching back from the threshold as from the brink of an elevator-well, the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous linen-closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for pleasant, prosy blankets and gaily fringed towels and cheerful white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender. Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery, he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance how the change of a partition, the readjustment of a proportion, had purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of an ill-favored memory. Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a linen-closet to be built right there, so inevitable did it suddenly seem for the child’s meager playroom to be enlarged just there, that to save his soul he could not estimate whether the happy plan had originated in a purely practical brain or a purely compassionate heart. Half proud of the brain, half touched by the heart, he passed on exploringly through the new playroom out into the hall again. Quite distinctly now through the aperture of the back stairs the kitchen voices came wafting up to him. “Oh, dear! oh, dear!” wailed his Little Girl’s peevish voice, “now that--that man’s come back again, I suppose we’ll have to eat in the dining-room all the time!” “‘That man’ happens to be your darling father,” admonished the White Linen Nurse’s laughing voice. “Even so,” wailed the Little Girl, “I love you best.” “Even so,” laughed the White Linen Nurse, “I love _you_ best.” “Just the same,” cried the Little Girl, shrilly--“just the same, let’s put the cream-pitcher ’way up high somewhere, so he can’t step in it.” As though from a head tilted suddenly backward the White Linen Nurse’s laugh rang out in joyous abandon. Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin; then equally impulsively the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was clumsy? Eh? Resentfully he stared down at his hands, those wonderfully dexterous, yes, ambidexterous, hands that were the aching envy of all his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared, the voice of the young Wall-Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway. “Supper’s all ready, sir!” came the clear, cordial summons. For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment almost nothing in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than to be invited to his own supper, in his own house, by a stranger. Fuming with a new sense of injury and injustice, he started heavily down the stairs to the dining-room. Standing patiently behind the Senior Surgeon’s chair with a laudable desire to assist his carving in any possible emergency that might occur, the White Linen Nurse experienced her first direct marital rebuff. “What do you think this is, an autopsy?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, tartly. “For Heaven’s sake, go and sit down!” Quite meekly the White Linen Nurse subsided into her place.