“Oh, I like it all right, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A little bit wanly this time she smiled her pluck up into the Senior Surgeon’s questioning face. “Oh, I like it all right, sir. Oh, of course, sir,” she confided thoughtfully--“oh, of course, sir, it isn’t quite as fancy as being engaged, or quite as free and easy as being single; but, still,” she admitted with desperate honesty--“but, still, there’s a sort of--a sort of a combination importance and--and comfort about it, sir, like a--like a velvet suit--the second year, sir.” “Is that all?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, bluntly. “That’s all so far, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. In November the White Linen Nurse caught a bit of cold that pulled her down a little. But the Senior Surgeon didn’t notice it specially among all the virulent ills he lived and worked with from day to day. And then when the cold disappeared, Indian summer came like a reeking sweat after a chill. And the house _was_ big, and the Little Crippled Girl _was_ pretty difficult to manage now and then, and the Senior Surgeon, no matter how hard he tried not to, did succeed somehow in creating more or less of a disturbance at least every other day or two. And then suddenly, one balmy, gold-and-crimson Indian summer morning, standing out on the piazza trying to hear what the Little Crippled Girl was calling from the window and what the Senior Surgeon was calling from the gate, the White Linen Nurse fell right down in her tracks, brutally, bulkily, like a worn-out horse, and lay, as she fell, a huddled white blot across the gray piazza. “Oh, Father, come quick! Come quick! Peach has deaded herself!” yelled the Little Girl’s frantic voice. Just with his foot on the step of his car the Senior Surgeon heard the cry and came speeding back up the long walk. Already there before him the Little Girl knelt, raining passionate, agonized kisses on her beloved playmate’s ghastly white face. “Leave her alone!” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “Leave her alone, I say!” Bruskly he pushed the Little Girl aside, and knelt to cradle his own ear against the White Linen Nurse’s heart. “Oh, it’s all right,” he growled, and gathered the White Linen Nurse right up in his arms--she was startlingly lighter than he had supposed--and carried her up the stairs and put her to bed like a child in the great sumptuous guest-room, in a great sumptuous nest of all the best linens and blankets, with the Little Crippled Girl superintending the task with many hysterical suggestions and sharp, staccato interruptions. For once in his life the Senior Surgeon did not stop to quarrel with his daughter. Rallying limply from her swoon, the White Linen Nurse at last stared out with hazy perplexity from her dimpling white pillows to see the Senior Surgeon standing amazingly at the guest-room bureau with a glass and a medicine-dropper in his hand, and the Little Crippled Girl hanging apparently by her narrow, peaked chin across the foot-board of the bed.