The White Linen Nurse’s face became 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. Carving 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. Much 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 much 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.”