“Father!” wailed a feeble little voice.  “Father!” There was no shrillness in the tone now, nor malice, nor any mischievous thing,—­just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger.  “Father!” the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder.  But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza.  “Fat Father!” screamed the little voice.  Barbed now like a shark-hook the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s dormant sensibilities.  As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts he whirled around in his tracks.

“What do you want?” he thundered.

Helplessly the little girl sat staring from a lackey’s ill-concealed grin to her Father’s smoldering fury.  Quite palpably she began to swallow with considerable difficulty.  Then quick as a flash a diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.

“Father?” she improvised dulcetly.  “Father?  May—­may I—­sit—­in the White Linen Nurse’s lap?”

Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s narrowing eyes probed mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile.  Then altogether brutally he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t care where in blazes you sit!” he muttered, and went on into the house.

With an air of unalterable finality the massive oak door closed after him.  In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.

Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts the White Linen Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.

“’Ha’—­yourself!” she said.

Against all possible expectancy the Little Crippled Girl burst out laughing.  The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet awkward withal, and indescribably bumpy, like the first flight of a cage-cramped bird.

Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and commenced nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly tarnished brass lamp at her elbow.  Equally abruptly after a minute she stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Would—­you—­like—­to sit in my lap?” she queried conscientiously.

Insolent with astonishment the Little Girl parried the question.  “Why in blazes—­should I want to sit in your lap?” she quizzed harshly.  Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon’s at his worst.  The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.

As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion.  Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down one pink cheek.

Instantly to the edge of her seat the Little Girl jerked herself forward.  “Don’t cry, Pretty!” she whispered.  “Don’t cry!  It’s my legs.  I’ve got fat iron braces on my legs.  And people don’t like to hold me!”