“See!  I call her ’Peach’!” she boasted joyously with all the triumphant air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this could not possibly fail to impress even a person so naturally obtuse as—­a father.

“Don’t be foolish!” snarled the Senior Surgeon.

“Who?  Me?” gasped the White Linen Nurse in a perfect agony of confusion.

“Yes!  You!” snapped the Senior Surgeon explosively half an hour later after interminable miles of absolute silence—­and dingy yellow field-stubble—­and bare brown alder bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, “where no rain was,” as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated by young men whose heads were tow, and hearts indisputably tinder, rather than tender.

“Yes!  You!” he reasserted vehemently at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most vital musings concerning Spinal Meningitis he scowled his way savagely back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

“Father?” she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the whizzing black road.  Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering gear!

“Father?” the Little Girl persisted valiantly.

To add to his original concentration the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin.  The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time; but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.

“Father!” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage.  Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.  “Fat Father! Fat Father!  F-a-t F-a-t-h-e-r!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers,—­catastrophe unspeakable,—­disaster now irrevocable!