A trifle faint-heartedly the Little Crippled Girl reached up and straightened her absurdly diminutive little white cap, and pursed her little mouth as nearly as possible into an expression of ineffable peace. “Why, Lendicott Faber!” she persisted heroically. “Lendicott!” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon. “What are _you_ ‘Lendicotting’ _me_ for?” Hilariously with her own knife and fork the Little Crippled Girl began to beat upon the table. “Why, you dear silly!” she cried--“why, if I’m the new marma, I’ve _got_ to call you Lendicott, and Peach has _got_ to call you Fat Father.” Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet. The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there before. “God!” he said, “this gives me the willies!” and strode tempestuously from the room. Out in his own workshop, fortunately, whatever the grotesque new pinkness, whatever the grotesque new perkiness, his great free walking-spaces had not been interfered with. Slamming his door triumphantly behind him, he resumed once more the monotonous pace, pace, pace that for eighteen years had characterized his first night’s return to civilization. Sharply around the corner of his battered old desk the little path started, wanly along the edge of his dingy book-shelves the little path furrowed, wistfully at the deep bay-window, where his favorite lilac-bush budded whitely for his departure, and rusted brownly for his return, the little path faltered, and went on again, on and on and on, into the alcove where his instruments glistened, up to the fireplace, where his college trophy-cups tarnished. Listlessly the Senior Surgeon began anew his yearly vigil. Up and down, up and down, round and round, on and on and on, through interminable ducks to unattainable dawns, a glutted, bacchanalian soul sweating its own way back to sanctity and leanness. Nerves always were in that vigil--raw, rattling nerves clamoring vociferously to be repacked in their sedatives. Thirst also was in that vigil; no mere whimpering tickle of the palate, but a drought of the tissues, a consuming fire of the bones. Hurt pride was also there, and festering humiliation. But more rasping, this particular night, than nerves, more poignant than thirst, more dangerously excitative even than remorse, hunger rioted in him--hunger, the one worst enemy of the Senior Surgeon’s cause, the simple, silly, no-account, gnawing, drink-provocative hunger of an empty stomach. And one other hunger was also there--a sudden fierce new lust for life and living, a passion bare of love, yet pure of wantonness, a passion primitive, protective, inexorably proprietary, engendered strangely in that one mad, suspicious moment at the edge of the summer-house when every outraged male instinct in him had leaped to prove that, love or no love, the woman was his.