For any real adventure except dying, June is certainly a most auspicious
month.
Indeed it was on the very first rain-green, rose-red morning of June
that the White Linen Nurse sallied forth upon her extremely hazardous
adventure of marrying the Senior Surgeon and his naughty little crippled
daughter.
The wedding was at noon in some kind of a gray granite church. And the
Senior Surgeon was there, of course,--and the necessary witnesses. But
the Little Crippled Girl never turned up at all, owing--it proved
later,--to a more than usually violent wrangle with whomever dressed
her, concerning the general advisability of sporting turquoise-colored
stockings with her brightest little purple dress.
The Senior Surgeon's stockings, if you really care to know, were gray.
And the Senior Surgeon's suit was gray. And he looked altogether very
huge and distinguished,--and no more strikingly unhappy than any
bridegroom looks in a gray granite church.
And the White Linen Nurse,--no longer now truly a White Linen Nurse but
just an ordinary, every-day, silk-and-cloth lady of any color she chose,
wore something rather coat-y and grand and bluish, and was distractingly
pretty of course but most essentially unfamiliar,--and just a tiny bit
awkward and bony-wristed looking,--as even an Admiral is apt to be on
his first day out of uniform.
Then as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, the bride and groom went
to a wonderful green and gold café all built of marble and lined with
music, and had a little lunch. What I really mean, of course, is that
they had a very large lunch, but didn't eat any of it!
Then in a taxi-cab, just exactly like any other taxi-cab, the White
Linen Nurse drove home alone to the Senior Surgeon's great, gloomy house
to find her brand new step-daughter still screaming over the turquoise
colored stockings.
And the Senior Surgeon in a Canadian-bound train, just exactly like any
other Canadian-bound train, started off alone,--as usual, on his annual
June "spree."
Please don't think for a moment that it was the Senior Surgeon who was
responsible for the general eccentricities of this amazing wedding day.
No indeed! The Senior Surgeon didn't _want_ to be married the first day
of June! He _said_ he didn't! He _growled_ he didn't! He _snarled_ he
didn't! He _swore_ he didn't! And when he finished saying and growling
and snarling and swearing,--and looked up at the White Linen Nurse for a
confirmation of his opinion, the White Linen Nurse smiled perfectly
amiably and said, "Yes, sir!"
Then the Senior Surgeon gave a great gasp of relief and announced
resonantly, "Well, it's all settled then? We'll be married some time in
July,--after I get home from Canada?" And when the White Linen Nurse
kept on smiling perfectly amiably and said, "Oh, no, sir! Oh, no, thank
you, sir! It wouldn't seem exactly legal to me to be married any other
month but June!" Then the Senior Surgeon went absolutely dumb with rage
that this mere chit of a girl,--and a trained nurse, too,--should dare
to thwart his personal and professional convenience. But the White Linen
Nurse just drooped her pretty blonde head and blushed and blushed and
blushed and said, "I was only marrying you, sir, to--accommodate
you--sir,--and if June doesn't accommodate you--I'd rather go to Japan
with that monoideic somnambulism case. It's very interesting. And it
sails June second." Then "Oh, Hell with the 'monoideic somnambulism
case'!" the Senior Surgeon would protest.
Really it took the Senior Surgeon quite a long while to work out the
three special arguments that should best protect him, he thought, from
the horridly embarrassing idea of being married in June.
"But you can't get ready so soon!" he suggested at last with real
triumph. "You've no idea how long it takes a girl to get ready to be
married! There are so many people she has to tell,--and everything!"
"There's never but two that she's got to tell--or bust!" conceded the
White Linen Nurse with perfect candor. "Just the woman she loves the
most--and the woman she hates the worst. I'll write my mother to-morrow.
But I told the Superintendent of Nurses yesterday."
"The deuce you did!" snapped the Senior Surgeon.
Almost caressingly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to
his. "Yes, sir," she said, "and she looked as sick as a young
undertaker. I can't imagine what ailed her."
"Eh?" choked the Senior Surgeon. "But the house now," he hastened to
contend. "The house now needs a lot of fixing over! It's all run down!
It's all--everything! We never in the world could get it into shape by
the first of June! For Heaven's sake, now that we've got money enough to
make it right, let's go slow and make it perfectly right!"
A little nervously the White Linen Nurse began to fumble through the
pages of her memorandum book. "I've always had money enough to 'go slow
and make things perfectly right,'" she confided a bit wistfully. "Never
in all my life have I had a pair of boots that weren't guaranteed, or a
dress that wouldn't wash, or a hat that wasn't worth at least three
re-pressings. What I was hoping for now, sir, was that I was going to
have enough money so that I could go fast and make things wrong if I
wanted to,--so that I could afford to take chances, I mean. Here's this
wall-paper now,"--tragically she pointed to some figuring in her
note-book--"it's got peacocks on it--life size--in a queen's garden--and
I wanted it for the dining-room. Maybe it would fade! Maybe we'd get
tired of it! Maybe it would poison us! Slam it on one week--and slash it
off the next! I wanted it just because I wanted it, sir! I thought
maybe--while you were way off in Canada--"
Eagerly the Senior Surgeon jerked his chair a little nearer to
his--fiancée's.
"Now, my dear girl," he said. "That's just what I want to explain!
That's just what I want to explain! Just what I want to explain!
To--er--explain!" he continued a bit falteringly.
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.
Very deliberately the Senior Surgeon removed a fleck of dust from one of
his cuffs.
"All this talk of yours--about wanting to be married the same day I
start off on my--Canadian trip!" he contended. "Why, it's all damned
nonsense!"
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.
Very conscientiously the Senior Surgeon began to search for a fleck of
dust on his other cuff.
"Why my--my dear girl," he persisted. "It's absurd! It's outrageous! Why
people would--would hoot at us! Why they'd think--!"
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.
"Why, my dear girl," sweated the Senior Surgeon. "Even though you and I
understand perfectly well the purely formal, business-like conditions of
our marriage, we must at least for sheer decency's sake keep up a
certain semblance of marital conventionality--before the world! Why, if
we were married at noon the first day of June--as you suggest,--and I
should go right off alone as usual--on my Canadian trip--and you should
come back alone to the house--why, people would think--would think that
I didn't care anything about you!"
"But you don't," said the White Linen Nurse serenely.
"Why, they'd think," choked the Senior Surgeon. "They'd think you were
trying your--darndest--to get rid of me!"
"I am," said the White Linen Nurse complacently.
With a muttered ejaculation the Senior Surgeon jumped to his feet and
stood glaring down at her.
Quite ingenuously the White Linen Nurse met and parried the glare.
"A gentleman--and a red-haired kiddie--and a great walloping house--all
at once! It's too much!" she confided genially. "Thank you just the
same, but I'd rather take them gradually. First of all, sir, you see,
I've got to teach the little kiddie to like me! And then there's a
green-tiled paper with floppity sea gulls on it--that I want to try for
the bath-room! And--and--" Ecstatically she clapped her hands together.
"Oh, sir! There are such loads and loads of experiments I want to try
while you are off on your spree!"
"S--h--h!" cried the Senior Surgeon. His face was suddenly
blanched,--his mouth, twitching like the mouth of one stricken with
almost insupportable pain. "For God's sake, Miss Malgregor!" he pleaded,
"can't you call it my--Canadian trip?"
Wider and wider the White Linen Nurse opened her big blue eyes at him.
"But it is a 'spree,' sir!" she attested resolutely. "And my father
says--" Still resolutely her young mouth curved to its original
assertion, but from under her heavy-shadowing eyelashes a little blue
smile crept softly out. "When my father's got a lame trotting horse,
sir, that he's trying to shuck off his hands," she faltered, "he doesn't
ever go round mournful-like with his head hanging--telling folks about
his wonderful trotter that's just 'the littlest, teeniest, tiniest
bit--lame.' Oh no! What father does is to call up every one he knows
within twenty miles and tell 'em, 'Say Tom,--Bill,--Harry,'--or whatever
his name is--'what in the deuce do you suppose I've got over here in my
barn? A lame horse--that wants to trot! Lamer than the deuce, you know!
But can do a mile in 2.40.'" Faintly the little blue smile quickened
again in the White Linen Nurse's eyes. "And the barn will be full of men
in half an hour!" she said. "Somehow nobody wants a trotter that's lame!
But almost anybody seems willing to risk a lame horse--that's plucky
enough to trot!"
"What's the 'lame trotting horse' got to do with--me?" snarled the
Senior Surgeon incisively.
Darkly the White Linen Nurse's lashes fringed down across her cheeks.
"Nothing much," she said, "Only--"
"Only what?" demanded the Senior Surgeon. A little more roughly than he
realized he stooped down and took the White Linen Nurse by her
shoulders, and jerked her sharply round to the light. "Only _what?_" he
insisted peremptorily.
Almost plaintively she lifted her eyes to his. "Only--my father says,"
she confided obediently, "my father says if you've got a worse
foot--for Heaven's sake put it forward--and get it over with!
"So--I've _got_ to call it a 'spree'!" smiled the White Linen Nurse.
"'Cause when I think of marrying a--_surgeon_--that goes off and gets
drunk every June--it--it scares me almost to my death! But--" Abruptly
the red smile faded from her lips, the blue smile from her eyes.
"But--when I think of marrying a--June drunk--that's got the grit to
pull up absolutely straight as a die and be a _surgeon_--all the other
'leven months in the year--" Dartingly she bent down and kissed the
Senior Surgeon's astonished wrist. "Oh, then I think you're perfectly
_grand_!" she sobbed.
Awkwardly the Senior Surgeon pulled away and began to pace the floor.
"You're a--good little girl, Rae Malgregor," he mumbled huskily. "A good
little girl. I truly believe you're the kind that will--see me through."
Poignantly in his eyes humiliation overwhelmed the mist. Perversely in
its turn resentment overtook the humiliation. "But I won't be married in
June!" he reasserted bombastically. "I won't! I won't! I won't! I tell
you I positively refuse to have a lot of damn fools speculating about my
private affairs! Wondering why I didn't take you! Wondering why I didn't
stay home with you! I tell you I won't! I simply won't!"
"Yes, sir," stammered the White Linen Nurse.
With a real gasp of relief the Senior Surgeon stopped his eternal pacing
of the floor.
"Bully for you!" he said. "You mean then we'll be married some time in
July after I get back from my--trip?"
"Oh, no, sir," stammered the White Linen Nurse.
"But Great Heavens!" shouted the Senior Surgeon.
"Yes, sir," the White Linen Nurse began all over again. Dreamily
planning out her wedding gown, her lips without the slightest conscious
effort on her part were already curving into shape for her alternate
"No, sir."
"You're an idiot!" snapped the Senior Surgeon.
A little reproachfully the White Linen Nurse came frowning out of her
reverie. "Would it do just as well for traveling, do you think?" she
asked, with real concern.
"Eh? What?" said the Senior Surgeon.
"I mean--does Japan spot?" queried the White Linen Nurse. "Would it spot
a serge, I mean?"
"Oh, Hell with Japan!" jerked the Senior Surgeon.
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse.
Now perhaps you will understand just exactly how it happened that the
Senior Surgeon and the White Linen Nurse _were_ married on the first day
of June, and just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon went
off alone as usual on his Canadian trip, and just exactly how it
happened that the White Linen Nurse came home alone to the Senior
Surgeon's great, gloomy house, to find her brand new step-daughter still
screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. Everything now is
perfectly comfortably explained except the turquoise-colored stockings.
Nobody could explain the turquoise-colored stockings!
But even a little child could explain the ensuing June! Oh, June was
perfectly wonderful that year! Bud, blossom, bird-song, breeze,--rioting
headlong through the Land. Warm days sweet and lush as a green-house
vapor! Crisp nights faintly metallic like the scent of stars!
Hurdy-gurdies romping tunefully on every street-corner! Even the Ash-Man
flushing frankly pink across his dusty cheek-bones!
Like two fairies who had sublet a giant's cave the White Linen Nurse and
the Little Crippled Girl turned themselves loose upon the Senior
Surgeon's gloomy old house.
It certainly was a gloomy old house, but handsome withal,--square and
brown and substantial, and most generously gardened within high brick
walls. Except for dusting the lilac bushes with the hose, and weeding a
few rusty leaves out of the privet hedge, and tacking up three or four
scraggly sprays of English ivy, and re-greening one or two bay-tree
boxes, there was really nothing much to do to the garden. But the house?
Oh ye gods! All day long from morning till night,--but most particularly
from the back door to the barn, sweating workmen scuttled back and
forth till nary a guilty piece of black walnut furniture had escaped.
All day long from morning till night,--but most particularly from
ceilings to floors, sweltering workmen scurried up and down step-ladders
stripping dingy papers from dingier plasterings.
When the White Linen Nurse wasn't busy renovating the big house--or the
little step-daughter, she was writing to the Senior Surgeon. She wrote
twice.
"Dear Dr. Faber," the first letter said.
* * * * *
DEAR DR. FABER,
How do you do? Thank you very much, for saying you didn't care what in
thunder I did to the house. It looks _sweet_. I've put white fluttery
muslin curtains most everywhere. And you've got a new solid-gold-looking
bed in your room. And the Kiddie and I have fixed up the most
scrumptious light blue suite for ourselves in the ell. Pink was wrong
for the front hall, but it cost me only $29.00 to find out. And now
that's settled for all time.
I am very, very, very, very busy. Something strange and new happens
every day. Yesterday it was three ladies and a plumber. One of the
ladies was just selling soap, but I didn't buy any. It was horrid soap.
The other two were calling ladies,--a silk one and a velvet one. The
silk one tried to be nasty to me. Right to my face she told me I was
more of a lady than she had dared to hope. And I told her I was sorry
for that as you'd had one "lady" and it didn't work. Was that all right?
But the other lady was nice. And I took her out in the kitchen with me
while I was painting the woodwork, and right there in her white kid
gloves she laughed and showed me how to mix the paint pearl gray. _She_
was nice. It was your sister-in-law.
I like being married, Dr. Faber. I like it lots better than I thought I
would. It's fun being the biggest person in the house. Respectfully
yours, RAE MALGREGOR,--AS WAS.
P.S. Oh, I hope it wasn't wrong, but in your ulster pocket, when I went
to put it away, I found a bottle of something that smelt as though it
had been forgotten.--I threw it out.
* * * * *
It was this letter that drew the only definite message from the
itinerant bridegroom.
"Kindly refrain from rummaging in my ulster pockets," wrote the Senior
Surgeon quite briefly. "The 'thing' you threw out happened to be the
cerebellum and medulla of an extremely eminent English Theologian!"
"Even so,--it was sour," telegraphed the White Linen Nurse in a perfect
agony of remorse and humiliation.
The telegram took an Indian with a birch canoe two days to deliver, and
cost the Senior Surgeon twelve dollars. Just impulsively the Senior
Surgeon decided to make no further comments on domestic affairs,--at
that particular range.
Very fortunately for this impulse the White Linen Nurse's second letter
concerned itself almost entirely with matters quite extraneous to the
home.
"Dear Dr. Faber," the second letter ran.
* * * * *
DEAR DR. FABER,
Somehow I don't seem to care so much just now about being the biggest
person in the house. Something awful has happened. Zillah Forsyth is
dead. Really dead, I mean. And she died in great heroism. You remember
Zillah Forsyth, don't you? She was one of my room-mates,--not the gooder
one, you know,--not the swell,--that was Helene Churchill. But Zillah?
Oh you know! Zillah was the one you sent out on that Fractured Elbow
case. It was a Yale student, you remember? And there was some trouble
about kissing,--and she got sent home? And now everybody's crying
because Zillah _can't_ kiss anybody any more! Isn't everything the
limit? Well, it wasn't a fractured Yale student she got sent out on this
time. If it had been, she might have been living yet. What they sent her
out on this time was a Senile Dementia,--an old lady more than eighty
years old. And they were in a sanitarium or something like that. And
there was a fire in the night. And the old lady just up and positively
refused to escape. And Zillah had to push her and shove her and yank her
and carry her--out the window--along the gutters--round the chimneys.
And the old lady bit Zillah right through the hand,--but Zillah wouldn't
let go. And the old lady tried to drown Zillah under a bursted water
tank,--but Zillah wouldn't let go. And everybody hollered to Zillah to
cut loose and save herself,--but Zillah wouldn't let go. And a wall
fell, and everything, and oh, it was awful,--but Zillah never let go.
And the old lady that wasn't any good to any one,--not even herself, got
saved of course. But Zillah? Oh, Zillah got hurt bad, sir! We saw her at
the hospital, Helene and I. She sent for us about something. Oh, it was
awful! Not a thing about her that you'd know except just her great
solemn eyes mooning out at you through a gob of white cotton, and her
red mouth lipping sort of twitchy at the edge of a bandage. Oh it was
awful! But Zillah didn't seem to care so much. There was a new Interne
there,--a Japanese, and I guess she was sort of taken with him. "But
my God, Zillah," I said, "_your_ life was worth more than that old
dame's!"
"Shut your noise!" says Zillah. "It was my job. And there's no kick
coming." Helene burst right out crying, she did. "Shut _your_ noise,
too!" says Zillah, just as cool as you please. "Bah! There's other lives
and other chances!"
"Oh, you do believe that now?" cries Helene. "Oh, you do believe that
now,--what the Bible promises you?" That was when Zillah shrugged her
shoulders so funny,--the little way she had. Gee, but her eyes were big!
"I don't pretend to know--what--your old Bible says," she choked. "It
was--the Yale feller--who was tellin' me."
That's all, Dr. Faber. It was her shrugging her shoulders so funny that
brought on the hemorrhage.
Oh, we had an awful time, sir, going home in the carriage,--Helene and
I. We both cried, of course, because Zillah was dead, but after we got
through crying for that, Helene kept right on crying because she
couldn't understand why a brave girl like Zillah _had_ to be dead. Gee!
But Helene takes things hard. Ladies do, I guess.
I hope you're having a pleasant spree.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that one of the wall-paperers is living here at
the house with us just now. We use him so much it's truly a good deal
more convenient. And he's a real nice young fellow, and he plays the
piano finely, and he comes from up my way. And it seemed more neighborly
anyway. It's so large in the house at night, just now, and so creaky in
the garden.
With kindest regards, good-by for now, from RAE.
P.S.
Don't tell your guide or _any one!_ But Helene sent Zillah's mother a
check for fifteen hundred dollars. I saw it with my own eyes. And all
Zillah asked for that day was just a little blue serge suit. It seems
she'd promised her kid sister a little blue serge suit for July. And it
sort of worried her.
Helene sent the little blue serge suit too! And a hat! The hat had
bluebells on it. Do you think when you come home--if I haven't spent too
much money on wall-papers--that I could have a blue hat with bluebells
on it? Excuse me for bothering you--but you forgot to leave me enough
money.
* * * * *
It was some indefinite, pleasant time on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of
June, that the Senior Surgeon received this second letter.
It was Friday the twenty-sixth of June, exactly at dawn, that the Senior
Surgeon started homeward.
Nobody looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn't.
Heavily as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his
cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling
shadows circled. Behind his sunburn,--deeper than his tan, something
sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul.
Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since
griddle-cake time the previous evening.
Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night.
For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the
forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all
night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled
wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain
peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with
mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling
insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch
canoe slosh-sloshed against the beach.
There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape. Just
tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and
the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched
for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee grounds.
Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a
paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian Guide
propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.
"Cutting your trip a bit short this year,--ain't you, Boss?" quizzed the
Indian guide.
Out from his muffling mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the
question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.
"Oh, I don't know," he answered with studied lightness. "There are one
or two things at home that are bothering me a little."
"A woman, eh?" said the Indian Guide laconically.
"A woman?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "A--woman? Oh, ye gods! No!
It's wall paper!"
Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation
the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing,--boisterously, hilariously like a
crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of
his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain
fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him.
The Senior Surgeon's laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a
purely convulsive physical impulse. But the echo's laugh was a phantasy
of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces where little
green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings
frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness.
Seven miles further down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the
Indian Guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two
rocks,--paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian Guide lifted
his voice high,--piercing, above the swirling roar of waters.
"Eh, Boss!" shouted the Indian Guide. "I ain't never heard you laugh
before!"
Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long,
strenuous hours that were left to them.
The Indian Guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out
just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his
front door and his cow-shed. I don't know what the Senior Surgeon was
trying to figure out.
It was just four days later from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack that
the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate.
Even though a man likes home no better than he likes--tea, few men would
deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long fussy railroad
journey. Five o'clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a peculiarly
wonderful time to be arriving home,--especially if that home has a
garden around it so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously upon
the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy visually
with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the actual
draught.
Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and his
heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long, broad
gravel path to the house. For a man walking as slow as he was, his heart
was beating most extraordinarily fast. He was not accustomed to
heart-palpitation. The symptom worried him a trifle. Incidentally also
his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of June. Close at his
right an effulgent white and gold syringa bush flaunted its cloying
sweetness into his senses. Close at his left a riotous bloom of phlox
clamored red-blue-purple-lavender-pink into his dazzled vision.
Multi-colored pansies tiptoed velvet-footed across the grass. In soft
murky mystery a flame-tinted smoke tree loomed up here and there like a
faintly rouged ghost. Over everything, under everything, through
everything, lurked a certain strange, novel, vibrating consciousness of
_occupancy_. Bees in the rose bushes! Bobolinks in the trees! A woman's
work-basket in the curve of the hammock! A doll's tea set sprawling
cheerfully in the middle of the broad gravel path!
It was not until the Senior Surgeon had actually stepped into the tiny
cream pitcher that he noticed the presence of the doll's tea set.
It was what the Senior Surgeon said as he stepped out of the cream
pitcher that summoned the amazing apparition from a ragged green hole in
the privet hedge. Startlingly white, startlingly professional,--dress,
cap, apron and all,--a miniature white linen nurse sprang suddenly out
at him like a tricky dwarf in a moving picture show. Just at that
particular moment the Senior Surgeon's nerves were in no condition to
wrestle with apparitions. Simultaneously as the clumsy rod-case dropped
from his hand, the expression of enthusiasm dropped from the face of the
miniature white linen nurse.
"Oh, dear--oh, dear--oh, dear! Have _you_ come home?" wailed the
familiar, shrill little voice.
Sheepishly the Senior Surgeon picked up his rod-case. The noises in his
head were crashing like cracked bells. Desperately with a boisterous
irritability he sought to cover also the lurching pound-pound-pound of
his heart.
"What in Hell are you rigged out like that for?" he demanded stormily.
With equal storminess the Little Girl protested the question.
"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.