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Page 38
The first message that astonished gentleman got was that a
red-haired person at the hospital was very ill, having run into a
wire fence and bruised a nose, and that he was to bring out at once
from town two doctors, six nurses, a cook and a furnace man!
After a time, however, as Jane grew calmer, he got it straightened
out, and said a number of things over the telephone anent the
deserting staff that are quite forbidden by the rules both of the
club and of the telephone company. He gave Jane full instructions
about sending to the village and having somebody come up and stay
with her, and about taking a hot footbath and going to bed between
blankets, and when Jane replied meekly to everything "Yes, father,"
and "All right, father," he was so stunned by her mildness that he
was certain she must be really ill.
Not that Jane had any idea of doing all these things. She hung up
the telephone and gathered all the candles from all the candlesticks
on the lower floor, and started back for the hospital. The moon had
come up and she had no more trouble with fencing, but she was
desperately tired. She climbed the drive slowly, coming to frequent
pauses. The hospital, long and low and sleeping, lay before her,
and in one upper window there was a small yellow light.
Jane climbed the steps and sat down on the top one. She felt very
tired and sad and dejected, and she sat down on the upper step to
think of how useless she was, and how much a man must know to be a
doctor, and that perhaps she would take up nursing in earnest and
amount to something, and----
It was about three o'clock in the morning when the red-haired
person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a
shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax
candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap
moved slightly and muttered "Lemme shleep."
The red-haired person said "Good Heavens!" and bending down held a
lighted match to the sleeper's face and stared, petrified. Jane
opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose
with one gesture.
"You!" said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match
went out.
"Don't light another," said Jane. "I'm an alarming sight.
Would--would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?"
He didn't move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.
"Where have you been?" he demanded.
"Over to telephone," said Jane, and yawned. "They're bringing
everybody in automobiles--doctors, nurses, furnace man--oh, dear me,
I hope I mentioned a cook!"
"Do you mean to say," said the red-haired person wonderingly, "that
you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out
of this mess?"
"Not at all," Jane corrected him coolly. "I'm in the mess myself."
"You'll be ill again."
"I never was ill," said Jane. "I was here for a mean disposition."
Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at
him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her
hands.
"You're a heroine," he said, and bending down he kissed first one
and then the other. "Isn't it bad enough that you are beautiful
without your also being brave?"
Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his
hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very
tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half
pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps----
"Am I still beautiful with this nose?" she asked.
"You are everything that a woman should be," he said, and dropping
her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and
young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her
long lashes.
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