holiday.  So the offer stands,—­my ’name and fame,’—­if those mean anything to you,—­financial independence,—­an assured ‘breathing spell’ for at least two months out of twelve,—­and at last but not least,—­my eternal gratitude!  ‘General Heartwork for a Family of Two’! There! Have I made the task perfectly clear to you?  Not everything to be done all at once, you know.  But immediately where necessity urges it,—­gradually as confidence inspires it,—­ultimately if affection justifies it,—­every womanish thing that needs to be done in a man’s and a child’s neglected lives?  Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Oh, and there’s one thing more,” confided the Senior Surgeon.  “It’s something, of course, that I ought to have told you the very first thing of all!” Nervously he glanced down at the sleeping child, and lowered his voice to a mumbling monotone.  “As regards my actual morals you have naturally a right to know that I’ve led a pretty decent sort of life,—­though I probably don’t deserve any special credit for that.  A man who knows enough to be a doctor isn’t particularly apt to lead any other kind.  Frankly,—­as women rate vices I believe I have only one.  What—­what—­I’m trying to tell you—­now—­is about that one.”  A little defiantly as to chin, a little appealingly as to eye, he emptied his heart of its last tragic secret.  “Through all the male line of my family, Miss Malgregor, dipsomania runs rampant.  Two of my brothers, my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather before him, have all gone down as the temperance people would say into ‘drunkards’ graves.’  In my own case, I have chosen to compromise with the evil.  Such a choice, believe me, has not been made carelessly or impulsively, but out of the agony and humiliation of—­several less successful methods.”  Hard as a rock, his face grooved into its granite-like furrows again.  “Naturally, under these existing conditions,” he warned her almost threateningly, “I am not peculiarly susceptible to the mawkishly ignorant and sentimental protests of—­people whose strongest passions are an appetite for—­chocolate candy!  For eleven months of the year,” he hurried on a bit huskily, “for eleven months of the year,—­eleven months,—­each day reeking from dawn to dark with the driving, nerve-wracking, heart-wringing work that falls to my profession, I lead an absolutely abstemious life, touching neither wine nor liquor, nor even indeed tea or coffee.  In the twelfth month,—­June always,—­I go way, way up into Canada,—­way, way off in the woods to a little log camp I own there,—­with an Indian who has guided me thus for eighteen years.  And live like a—­wild man for four gorgeous, care-free, trail-tramping, salmon-fighting,—­whisky-guzzling weeks.  It is what your temperance friends would call a—­’spree.’  To be quite frank, I suppose it is what—­anybody would call a ‘spree.’  Then the first of July,—­three or four days past the first of July perhaps,—­I come out of the woods—­quite tame again.  A little emotionally nervous, perhaps,—­a little temperishly irritable,—­a little unduly sensitive about being greeted as a returned jail-bird,—­but most miraculously purged of all morbid craving for liquor, and with every digital muscle as coolly steady as yours, and every conscious mental process clamoring cleanly for its own work again.”