his kisses.
"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."

"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."

"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.
Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."

"That be damned."

"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled
into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered
in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"
Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than
any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her
so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked
so wee!"

"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her
so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his
maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,
and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of
the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no
sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family
now. You might have let me do that!"

"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you
see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's
no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have
been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was
her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme
poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury
but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the
beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've
told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six
weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all
the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful
tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call
on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her
mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the
slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and
gathered her closely to him.

"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.

"You look very beautiful."

"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."

"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fast