“Servants?” cooed the White Linen Nurse.  “Servants?” Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon’s hectic face.  “Why, there aren’t any servants,” she explained patiently.  “I’ve dismissed every one of them.  We’re doing our own work now!”

“Doing ’our own work’?” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Quite worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little.  “Why, wasn’t that right?” she pleaded.  “Wasn’t it right?  Why, I thought people always did their own work when they were first married!” With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock, and darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a fierce-looking knife.

“I’m so late now and everything,” she confided.  “Could you peel the potatoes for me?”

“No, I couldn’t!” said the Senior Surgeon shortly.  Equally shortly he turned on his heel, and reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip went on up the stairs to his own room.

One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while other people are getting supper.  No existent domestic sound in the whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the sound of other people getting supper.

Stretched out full length in a big easy chair by his bed-room window, with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new “solid gold bed” and his new sage green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the faint, far-away accompaniment of soft thudding feet, and a girl’s laugh, and a child’s prattle, and the tink-tink-tinkle of glass,—­china,—­silver,—­all scurrying consciously to the service of one man,—­and that man,—­himself.

Very, very slowly, in that special half hour an inscrutable little smile printed itself experimentally across the right hand corner of the Senior Surgeon’s upper lip.

While that smile was still in its infancy he jumped up suddenly and forced his way across the hall to his dead wife’s room,—­the one ghost-room of his house and his life,—­and there with his hand on the turning door knob,—­tense with reluctance,—­goose-fleshed with strain,—­his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one word—­“Alice!”

And behold!  There was no room there!

Lurching back from the threshold, as from the brink of an elevator well, the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous linen closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for pleasant prosy blankets, and gaily fringed towels, and cheerful white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender.  Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance how the change of a partition, the re-adjustment of a proportion, had purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of an ill-favored memory.  Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a linen closet to be built right there,—­so inevitable did it suddenly seem for the child’s meager play-room to be enlarged just there, that to save his soul he could not estimate whether the happy plan had originated in a purely practical brain or a purely compassionate heart.