“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 stared out with hazy perplexity at last 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.

Gazing down worriedly at the lace-ruffled sleeve of her night-dress the White Linen Nurse made her first public speech to the—­world at large.

“Who—­put—­me—­to—­bed?” whispered the White Linen Nurse.

Ecstatically the Little Crippled Girl began to pound her fists on the foot-board of the bed.

“Father did!” she cried in unmistakable triumph.  “All the little hooks!  All the little buttons!—­wasn’t it cunning?”

The Senior Surgeon would hardly have been human if he hadn’t glanced back suddenly over his shoulder at the White Linen Nurse’s precipitously changing color.  Quite irrepressibly, as he saw the red, red blood come surging home again into her cheeks, a little short chuckling laugh escaped him.

“I guess you’ll live—­now,” he remarked dryly.

Then because a Senior Surgeon can’t stay home on the mere impulse of the moment from a great rushing hospital, just because one member of his household happens to faint perfectly innocently in the morning, he hurried on to his work again.  And saved a little boy, and lost a little girl, and mended a fractured thigh, and eased a gun-shot wound, and came dashing home at noon in one of his thousand-dollar hours to feel the White Linen Nurse’s pulse and broil her a bit of tenderloin steak with his own thousand-dollar hands,—­and then went dashing off again to do one major operation or another, telephoned home once or twice during the afternoon to make sure that everything was all right, and finding that the White Linen Nurse was comfortably up and about again, went sprinting off fifty miles somewhere on a meningitis consultation, and came dragging home at last, somewhere near midnight, to a big black house brightened only by a single light in the kitchen where the White Linen Nurse went tiptoeing softly from stove to pantry in deft preparation of an appetizing supper for him.