"I'll tell you what," said the old doctor, gruffly, "we will let you go if you will promise to come back if--if no one's at home. It's against rules, but I'll see the superintendent keeps your bed for you to-night."
"Thank you," said Patsy. She waved a farewell to the staff and the ward as she went through the door. "I don't know where I'm going or what I shall be finding, but if it's anything worth sharing I'll send some back to you all."
The staff watched her down the corridor to the elevator.
"Gee!" exclaimed the youngest doctor, his admiration working out to the surface. "When she's made her name I'm going to marry her."
"Oh, are you?" The voice of the old doctor took on its habitual tartness. "Acute touch of philanthropy, what--eh?"
Patricia O'Connell swung the hospital door behind her and stepped out into a blaze of June sunshine. "Holy Saint Patrick! but it feels good. Now if I could be an alley cat for two months I could get along fine."
She cast a backward look toward the granite front of the City Hospital and her eyes grew as blue and soft as the waters of Killarney. "Sure, cat or human, the world's a grand place to be alive in."
Marjorie Schuyler sat in her own snug little den, her toy ruby spaniel on a cushion at her feet, her lap full of samples of white, shimmering crêpes and satins. She fingered them absent-mindedly, her mind caught in a maze of wedding intricacies and dates, and whirled between an ultimate choice between October and June of the following year.
The world knew all there was to know about Marjorie Schuyler. It could tell to a nicety who her paternal and maternal grandparents were, back to old Peter Schuyler's time and the settling of the Virginian Berkeleys. It could figure her income down to a paltry hundred of the actual amount. It knew her age to the month and day. In fact, it had kept her calendar faithfully, from her coming-out party, through the periods of mourning for her parents and her subsequent returns to society, through the rumors of her engagements to half a dozen young leaders at home and abroad, down to her latest conquest.
The last date on her calendar was the authorized announcement of her engagement to young Burgeman. Hence the shimmering samples and the relative values of October and June for a wedding journey.