es in that jerry-built western hospital,
and remembered that I was still in the land of the living and that the
red-headed surgical nurse was holding my wrist. I felt infinitely hurt
and abused, and wondered why my husband wasn't there to help me with
that comforting brown gaze of his. And I wanted to cry, but didn't
seem to have the strength, and then I wanted to say something, but
found myself too weak.

It was the doctor's voice that roused me again. He was standing beside
my narrow iron bed with his sleeves still rolled up, wiping his arms
with a big white towel. He was smiling as he scrubbed at the corners
of his nails, as though to make sure they were clean. The nurse on the
other side of the bed was also smiling. So was the carrot-top with the
loganberry beauty-spot. All I could see, in fact, was smiling faces.

But it didn't seem a laughing matter to me. I wanted to rest, to
sleep, to get another gulp or two of that God-given smelly stuff out
of the little round tin can.

"How're you feeling?" asked the doctor indifferently. He nodded down
at me as he proceeded to manicure those precious nails of his. They
were laughing, the whole four of them. I began to suspect that I
wasn't going to die, after all.

"Everything's fine and dandy," announced the barearmed farrier as he
snapped his little pen-knife shut. But that triumphant grin of his
only made me more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall young
nurse on the other side of my bed.

There was perspiration on her forehead, under the eaves of the pale
hair crowned with its pointed little cap. She was still smiling, but
she looked human and tired and a little fussed.

"Is it a girl?" I asked her. I had intended to make that query a
crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to stand as a reproof to them,
as a mark of disapproval for all such untimely merriment. But my
voice, I found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to know.

"_It's both_," said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and white uniform.
And she, too, nodded her head in a triumphant sort of way, as though
the credit for some vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own
narrow lap.

"It's both?" I repeated, wondering why she too should fail to give a
simple answer to a simple question.

"It's twins!" she said, with a little chirrup of laughter.

"Twins?" I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the
pea-green mist out of that room with the dead white walls.

"Twins," pr