The doctor's dim old eyes looked curiously at her. "I believe you've got some deviltry in your head, Sissy. Now, you mind me and let your sister alone. There! I'm all right now. I can go all right the rest of the way when I'm once started down your infernal stairs. I ought to charge your father double rates for risking my old bones on them. Yes, it's all right now. It's only the first step that bothers me. It's always the first step that costs--eh, Sissy?" She looked blankly up at him. He bent down and patted her head. "See here," he said, "I'll bet you've got more sense than you want us to believe." Sissy blushed. It was a tardy tribute, she felt, but as welcome as it was deserved. "With a lot of common sense and a physique like yours, you ought to make a good nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly, divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and irritable and--even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives; and this recognition made him seem more human to them than any other adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard row to hoe, that poor, bad Split. She must sleep, and you understand her--Lord! Lord! the care these queer little devils need!" he muttered, shaking his shoulders as he went on down the steps, as though physically to throw off responsibility. Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a playmate or a fighting-mate--it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision of pretty young death--herself in white and the mysterious glamour of the silent sleep. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!