The White Linen Nurse’s face went almost as blanched as her dress.  “You’re—­you’re not asking me to—­marry you, sir?” she stammered.

“I suppose I am!” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon.

“Not marry you!” cried the White Linen Nurse.  Distress was in her voice,—­distaste,—­unmitigable shock, as though the high gods themselves had fallen at her feet and splintered off into mere candy fragments.

“Oh—­not marry you, sir?” she kept right on protesting.  “Not be—­engaged, you mean?  Oh, not be engaged—­and everything?”

“Well, why not?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Like a smitten flower the girl’s whole body seemed to wilt down into incalculable weariness.

“Oh—­no—­no!  I couldn’t!” she protested.  “Oh, no,—­really!” Appealingly she lifted her great blue eyes to his, and the blueness was all blurred with tears.  “I’ve—­I’ve been engaged—­once—­you know,” she explained falteringly.  “Why—­I was engaged, sir, almost as soon as I was born, and I stayed engaged till two years ago.  That’s almost twenty years.  That’s a long time, sir.  You don’t get over it—­easy.”  Very, very gravely she began to shake her head.  “Oh—­no—­sir!  No!  Thank you—­very much—­but I—­I just simply couldn’t begin at the beginning and go all through it again!  I haven’t got the heart for it!  I haven’t got the spirit!  Carvin’ your initials on trees and—­and gadding round to all the Sunday school picnics—­”

Brutally like a boy the Senior Surgeon threw back his head in one wild hoot of joy.  Infinitely more cautiously as the agonizing pang in his shoulder lulled down again he proceeded to argue the matter, but the grin in his face was even yet faintly traceable.

“Frankly, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed, “I’m infinitely more addicted to carving people than to carving trees.  And as to Sunday school picnics?  Well, really now—­I hardly believe that you’d find my demands in that direction—­excessive!”

Perplexedly the White Linen Nurse tried to stare her way through his bantering smile to his real meaning.  Furiously, as she stared, the red blood came flushing back into her face.

“You don’t mean for a second that you—­that you love me?” she asked incredulously.

“No, I don’t suppose I do!” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon with equal bluntness.  “But my little kiddie here loves you!” he hastened somewhat nervously to affirm.  “Oh, I’m almost sure that my little kiddie here—­loves you!  She needs you anyway!  Let it go at that!  Call it that we both—­need you!”

“What you mean is—­” corrected the White Linen Nurse, “that needing somebody—­very badly, you’ve just suddenly decided that that somebody might as well be me?”

“Well—­if you choose to put it—­like that!” said the Senior Surgeon a bit sulkily.

“And if there hadn’t been an auto accident?” argued the White Linen Nurse just out of sheer inquisitiveness, “if there hadn’t been just this particular kind of an auto accident—­at this particular hour—­of this particular day—­of this particular month—­with marigolds and—­everything, you probably never would have realized that you did need anybody?”