know, until we can get a nurse here,
won't you, Lil?"

As a frightened child might do, I turned my eyes to Lillian,
beseechingly.

"No--nurse--just--Lillian," I faltered.

Lillian stooped over me reassuringly.

"No one shall touch you but me," she said decisively, and then turning
to the physician, said demurely:

"Do you think I can be trusted with the case, doctor?"

"Most assuredly," the physician returned heartily. "Indeed, if you can
stay it is most fortunate for Mrs. Graham. Good trained nurses are at
a premium just now, and great care will be necessary in this case to
prevent disfigurement!"

A quick, stifled exclamation of dismay came from Dicky.

"Is there any danger of her face being scarred?" he asked worriedly.

"Not while I'm on the job," Lillian returned decisively, and there was
no idle boasting in her statement, simply quiet certainty.

But there was another note in her voice, or so it seemed to my
feverish imagination, a note of scorn for Dicky, that he should be
thinking of my possible disfigurement when my very life had been in
question but a moment before.

A sick terror crept over me. Did my husband love me only for what poor
claims to pulchritude I possessed? Suppose the physician should be
mistaken, and I be hideously scarred, after all, as I had seen fire
victims scarred, would I see the love light die in his eyes, would I
never again witness the admiring glances Dicky was wont to flash at me
when I wore something especially becoming?

I had often wondered since my marriage whether Dicky's love for me was
the real lasting devotion which could stand adversity. I knew that no
matter how old or gray or maimed or disfigured Dicky might become he
would be still my royal lover. I should never see the changes in him.
But if I should suddenly turn an ugly scarred face to Dicky would he
shrink from me?

An epigram from one of the sanest and cleverest of our modern
humorists flashed into my mind. Dicky and I had read it together only
a few weeks before.

"Heaven help you, madam, if your husband does not love you because of
your foibles instead of in spite of them."

Did all women have this experience I wondered, and then as Lillian's
face bent over me I caught my breath in an understanding wave of pity
for her.

This was what she was undergoing, this experience of seeing her
husband turn away his eyes from her, as if the very sight of her was
painful to him.

Dicky would never do th