e in the hospital, but
he had never really noticed how attractive she was. Rather stunning
she was, he thought. The combination of yellow hair and dark eyes
was unusual. He remembered, just in time, to express regret at Miss
Simpson's bereavement.

"I am Miss Harrison," explained the substitute, and held out his long
white coat. The ceremony, purely perfunctory with Miss Simpson on duty,
proved interesting, Miss Harrison, in spite of her high heels, being
small and the young surgeon tall. When he was finally in the coat, she
was rather flushed and palpitating.

"But I KNEW your name, of course," lied Dr. Max. "And--I'm sorry about
the vacation."

After that came work. Miss Harrison was nimble and alert, but the
surgeon worked quickly and with few words, was impatient when she could
not find the things he called for, even broke into restrained profanity
now and then. She went a little pale over her mistakes, but preserved
her dignity and her wits. Now and then he found her dark eyes fixed
on him, with something inscrutable but pleasing in their depths. The
situation was: rather piquant. Consciously he was thinking only of what
he was doing. Subconsciously his busy ego was finding solace after last
night's rebuff.

Once, during the cleaning up between cases, he dropped to a personality.
He was drying his hands, while she placed freshly sterilized instruments
on a glass table.

"You are almost a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London
ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who looked like you."

"My mother was a Spaniard." She did not look up.

Where Miss Simpson was in the habit of clumping through the morning in
flat, heavy shoes, Miss Harrison's small heels beat a busy tattoo on
the tiled floor. With the rustling of her starched dress, the sound was
essentially feminine, almost insistent. When he had time to notice it,
it amused him that he did not find it annoying.

Once, as she passed him a bistoury, he deliberately placed his fine
hand over her fingers and smiled into her eyes. It was play for him; it
lightened the day's work.

Sidney was in the waiting-room. There had been no tedium in the
morning's waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of
dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to
foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the
waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she
was even imagining herself proposed to