“I heard the noise of the escaping steam.”  She came close and stood beside him, where he sat, half dressed and ruddy in his bathrobe.  He put up both arms and held her, lifting his head for her kiss, which he returned with interest.

“That’s the first nice thing that’s happened to me to-day—­since the one I had when I left you this morning,” he remarked.  “I’m all in to-night, and ugly as a bear, as usual.  I feel better, just this minute, with you in my arms and a bath to the good, but I’m a beast just the same, and you’d best take warning....  Oh, the—­”

For the telephone bell was ringing again.  From the way he strode across the floor in his bathrobe and slippers it was small wonder that the walls trembled.  His wife, watching him, felt a thrill of sympathy for the unfortunate who was to get the full force of that concussion.  With a scowl on his brow he lifted the receiver, and his preliminary “Hello!” was his deepest-throated growl.  But then the scene changed.  Red Pepper listened, the scowl giving place to an expression of a very different character.  He asked a quick question or two, with something like a most unaccustomed breathlessness in his voice, and then he said, in the businesslike but kind way which characterized him when his sympathies were roused: 

“I’ll be there as quick as I can get there.  Call Doctor Buller for me, and let Doctor Grayson know I may want him.”

Rushing at the completion of his dressing he gave a hurried explanation, in answer to his wife’s anxious inquiry, “It isn’t Anne Linton?”

“It’s worse, it’s Jord King.  He’s had a bad accident—­confound his recklessness!  I’m afraid he’s made a mess of it this time for fair, though I can’t be sure till I get there.”

“Where is he?” Ellen’s face had turned pale.

“At the hospital.  His man Aleck is hurt, too.  Call Johnny, please, and have him bring the car around and go with me.”

Ellen flew, and five minutes later watched her husband gulp down a cup of the strong coffee Cynthia always made him at such crises when, in spite of fatigue, he must lose no time nor adequately reenforce his physical energy with food.

“Oh, I’m so sorry you couldn’t rest to-night,” she said as he set down the cup and, pulling his hat over his eyes, picked up the heavy surgical bags.

“Couldn’t, anyway, with the universe on my mind, so I might as well keep going,” was Burns’s gruff reply, though the kiss he left on her lips was a long one and spoke his appreciation of her tender comradeship.

She did not see him again till morning, though she lay awake many hours.  He came in at daylight; she heard the car go in at the driveway, and, rising hurriedly, was ready to meet him when he came into the living room downstairs.

“Up so early?” questioned Burns as he saw her.  The next minute he had folded her in one of those strong-armed embraces which speak of a glad return to one whose life is a part of one’s own.  “I wonder,” he murmured, with his cheek pressed to hers, “if a man ever came back to sweeter arms than these!”