little while now.” 

 She picked up the vase and carried it into the corridor, and the carnations nodded their heads more vigorously than ever over her shoulder. 

 I heard her call softly to some one. The some one answered with a sharp little cry that sounded like, “Conscious!” 

 The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into the room, and knelt at the side of my bed and took me in her arms. It did not seem at all surprising that she should be there, patting me with reassuring little love pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my cheek, calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had not heard for years. But then, nothing seemed to surprise me that surprising day. Not even the sight of a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man who strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of denouncing newspapers in general, and my newspaper in particular, and calling the city editor a slave-driver and a beast. The big, red-haired man stood regarding us tolerantly. 

 “Better, eh?” said he, not as one who asks a question, but as though in confirmation of a thought. Then he too took my wrist between his fingers. His touch was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my eyelids and said, “H’m.” Then he patted my cheek smartly once or twice. “You’ll do,” he pronounced. He picked up a sheet of paper from the table and looked it over, keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then, as she left the room the big red-haired man seated himself heavily in the chair near the bedside and rested his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at me in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand. 

 “Married, h’m?” 

 For a moment the word would not come. I could hear Norah catch her breath quickly. Then—“Yes,” answered I. 

 “Husband living?” I could see suspicion dawning in his cold gray eye. 

 Again the catch in Norah’s throat and a little half warning, half supplicating gesture. And again, “Yes,” said I. 

 The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow. 

 “Where is he?” growled the red-haired doctor. “At a time like this?” 

 Prev. P 2/141 next