Much as we would like to present Desire in this thoroughly sensible light, we fear that her action on the morning following her visit to the invalid Miss Martin would not bear us out in so doing.  For on that morning, with all facts of the situation freshly in her mind, she went down-town to Dr. Rogers’ office for no other purpose than to see and talk to Dr. Rogers’ yellow-haired nurse.

“When I see her and hear her,” said Desire to her-self, “I shall know.  And it will be so comfortable to know.”  Never a word, mind you, about the inconsistency of being uncomfortable through not knowing.

No attempt at reminding herself that knowledge was none of her business.  No arguing out of the matter at all.  Merely the following of a blind impulse to find Mary if Mary were to be found.

This impulse, which was wholly foreign to her natural habit of mind, she justified to herself under the guise of “natural curiosity.”  All she had to do was to make the call seem sufficiently casual and to time her arrival at the doctor’s office at an hour when he could not possibly be in it.  As a newcomer, such a mistake would seem quite plausible and could be passed over easily with “How stupid of me!  I should have known.”  After that the nurse would probably invite her to wait.  And, even if she did not, the mere exchange of question and. answer would probably be sufficiently revealing.

This small program proceeded exactly as planned and Desire, in her most becoming frock, learned of the absence of Dr. Rogers with exactly the right degree of impatience and regret.

“Please come in,” said Dr. Rogers’ nurse in somewhat drawling accents.  “Doctor may be back any minute.”  Being a nurse she always predicted the doctor’s arrival no matter how certain she might be that he would not arrive.

Desire hesitated, glanced quite naturally at her watch and decided to wait.  “If you are sure the doctor won’t be long—?” The nurse was sure that he wouldn’t be long.

Here her interest in the caller seemed to cease and she became very much occupied with a business-like addressing of envelopes at a desk in the corner.

Desire looked around the cool and pleasant room.  It was not like her idea of a doctor’s office, save perhaps for a faint clean smell of drugs.  There were comfortable chairs, flowers in a window-box, a table with a book or two and some magazines.  Through a half-open door, an inner office showed—­all very different from the picture her memory showed her of the musty, cumbered room in which her father had received his dwindling patients.  As a child she had hated that room, hated the hideous charts of “people with their skins off,” the ponderous books with their horrific and highly colored plates, the “patients’ chair” with its clinging odor of plush and ether, the untidy desk, the dust on everything!

But she had not come to Dr. Rogers’ office to indulge in memory.  She had come to see the lady who was so busily addressing envelopes and, after a decent interval of polite abstraction, she devoted herself cautiously to this purpose.