"Peach said I could!" she attested passionately. "Peach said I could! She did! She did! I tell you I didn't want her to marry us--that day! I was afraid, I was! I cried, I did! I had a convulsion! They thought it was stockings! So Peach said if it would make me feel any gooderer, I could be the cruel new step-mother. And she'd be the unloved offspring--with her hair braided all yellow fluffikins down her back!" "Where _is_--Miss Malgregor?" asked the Senior Surgeon sharply. Irrelevantly the Little Girl sank down on the gravel walk and began to gather up her scattered dishes. "And it's fun to go to bed--now," she confided amiably. "'Cause every night I put Peach to bed at eight o'clock and she's so naughty always I have to stay with her! And then all of a sudden it's morning--like going through a black room without knowing it!" "I said--where _is_ Miss Malgregor?" repeated the Senior Surgeon with increasing sharpness. Thriftily the Little Girl bent down to lap a bubble of cream from the broken pitcher. "Oh, she's out in the summer house with the Wall Paper Man," she mumbled indifferently. CHAPTER IX Altogether jerkily the Senior Surgeon started up the walk for his own perfectly formal and respectable brown stone mansion. Deep down in his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account cedar summer house. Startled by the crackle and thud of his approach the two young figures in the summer house jumped precipitously to their feet, and limply untwining their arms from each other's necks stood surveying the Senior Surgeon in unspeakable consternation,--the White Linen Nurse and a blue overalled lad most unconscionably mated in radiant youth and agonized confusion. "Oh, my Lord, Sir!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Oh, my Lord, Sir! I wasn't looking for _you_--for another week!" "Evidently not!" said the Senior Surgeon incisively. "This is the second time this evening that I've been led to infer that my home-coming was distinctly inopportune!" Very slowly, very methodically, he put down first his precious rod-case and then his grip. His brain seemed fairly foaming with blood and confusion. Along the swelling veins of his arms a dozen primitive instincts went surging to his fists. Then quite brazenly before his eyes the White Linen Nurse reached out and took the lad's hand again. "Oh, forgive me, Dr. Faber!" she faltered. "This is my brother!" "Your _brother?--what?--eh?_" choked the Senior Surgeon. Bluntly he reached out and crushed the young fellow's fingers in his own. "Glad to see you, Son!" he muttered with a sickish sort of grin, and turning abruptly, picked up his baggage again and started for the big house. Half a step behind him his White Linen Bride followed softly.