door, of course."

"I wasn't talking to you," I snapped, crossly, "I was speaking to the
carnations; particularly to that elderly one at the top--the fat one who
keeps bowing and wagging his head at me."

"Oh, yes," answered the striped nurse, politely, "of course. That one is
very lively, isn't he? But suppose we take them out for a little while
now."

She picked up the vase and carried it into the corridor, and the
carnations nodded their heads more vigorously than ever over her
shoulder.

I heard her call softly to some one. The some one answered with a sharp
little cry that sounded like, "Conscious!"

The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into the room, and
knelt at the side of my bed and took me in her arms. It did not seem
at all surprising that she should be there, patting me with reassuring
little love pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my check,
calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had not heard for
years. But then, nothing seemed to surprise me that surprising day. Not
even the sight of a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man
who strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of denouncing
newspapers in general, and my newspaper in particular, and calling the
city editor a slave-driver and a beast. The big, red-haired man stood
regarding us tolerantly.

"Better, eh?" said he, not as one who asks a question, but as though
in confirmation of a thought. Then he too took my wrist between his
fingers. His touch was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my
eyelids and said, "H'm." Then he patted my cheek smartly once or twice.
"You'll do," he pronounced. He picked up a sheet of paper from the table
and looked it over, keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and
glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then, as she left the
room the big red-haired man seated himself heavily in the chair near the
bedside and rested his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at
me in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a terrier. Finally
his glance rested on my limp left hand.

"Married, h'm?"

For a moment the word would not come. I could hear Norah catch her
breath quickly. Then--"Yes," answered I.

"Husband living?" I could see suspicion dawning in his cold gray eye.

Again the catch in Norah's throat and a little half warning, half
supplicating gesture. And again, "Yes," said I.

The dawn of suspicion burst into full g