“You may come in with me, if you want to, Miss Malgregor.” he conceded.  “It’s an extraordinary case.  You will hardly see another one like it.”  Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice.  “The boy is young,” he confided, “about your age, I should guess, a college foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it has ever been my privilege to behold.  It will be a long case.  They have two nurses already, but would like another.  The work ought not to be hard.  Now if they should happen to—­fancy you!” In speechless expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables, garages, Italian gardens, rapturous blue-shadowed mountain views—­every last intimate detail of the mansion’s wonderful equipment.

Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from him, the White Linen Nurse dug her finger-nails frantically into every reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.

“Oh, but sir, I don’t want to go in!” she protested passionately.  “I tell you, sir, I’m quite done with all that sort of thing!  It would break my heart!  It would!  Oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom you’ve got no affection,—­it’s like sledding without any snow!  It grits right down on your naked nerves.  It—­”

Before the Senior Surgeon’s glowering, incredulous stare her heart began to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she was obliged to pass his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur an inaudible “Good Morning” or “Good Evening.”  “After all, he’s nothing but a man—­nothing but a man—­nothing but a mere—­ordinary—­two-legged man,” she reasoned over and over to herself.  With a really desperate effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter guilelessness and peace and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior Surgeon’s rousing anger as she had once seen an animal-trainer smile into the snarl of a crouching tiger.

“Th—­ank you very much!” she said.  “But I think I won’t go in, sir,—­thank you!  My—­my face is still pretty tired!”

“Idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started up the steps.

From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful “Ha!” piped out.  But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, sing-song monotone of “He loves me—­Loves me not—­Loves me—­Loves me not.”

Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior Surgeon proceeded up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.