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Page 8
Steps sounded upon the office porch. Burns made a flying leap for the
door into his private office, intent on getting to his room and
exchanging his working garb for one suited to the evening he meant
to spend with Ellen. When he had swiftly but noiselessly closed the door,
Miss Mathewson answered the knock.
A tall countryman loomed in the doorway.
"Doctor in?"
"He is in," said the office nurse, who would tell lies to nobody, "but he
is engaged. Office-hours are over. Please give me any message for him."
"I'd like to see him," said the countryman, doggedly.
"I don't wish to disturb him unless it is quite necessary," explained
Miss Mathewson.
"I call it necessary," said the countryman, "when a fellow has a broken
leg. Got him out here in the wagon. Now will you call the Doctor?"
"I surely will," and Miss Mathewson smiled sympathetically.
She called her employer, who came out, frowning, still in his white coat.
"Confound you, Jake," said he, "don't you know it's against the law to
break legs or mend them after office-hours?"
Miss Mathewson, in the brief interval consumed by the men in bringing the
injured man in from the street, slipped across the hall.
"It will be another hour, Mrs. Burns," said she, at the door of the
living-room. "But after that I shall not be here to answer the door or
the telephone, and the Doctor can ignore them, if he will."
Ellen rose, smiling, and came across the room to her. The two
figures, one in the severe white of a uniform, the other in the filmy,
lace-bordered white of a delicate house gown, met in the doorway.
"You dear, kind little person," said Red Pepper's wife, with her warm
hand on the nurse's arm, "how good it is of you to care! But I can wait.
Can't you stay in here with me, while the Doctor sees his patient?"
"I must help him. It's a broken leg, and I must go this minute," said
Miss Mathewson. But she paused for an instant more, looking at Ellen.
The nurse was the taller, and looked the older of the two, but the
affectionate phrase "little person" had somehow touched a heart which was
lonelier even than Ellen guessed--and Ellen guessed much more than Red
Pepper had ever done. Red Pepper's wife leaned forward.
"You and I must be good friends," said she, and Miss Mathewson responded
with a flush of pleasure. Then the nurse flew back to the office, while
Ellen, after listening for a little to the sounds of footsteps in the
office, turned back to the fire.
"How does it happen," said she musingly to herself, as she stood looking
down into the depths of the glowing heart of it, "that one woman can be
so rich and one so poor--under the same roof? She sees more of him than
I,--lives her life closer to him, in a way,--and yet I am rich and she is
poor. How I wish I could make her happy--as happy as she can be without
the one thing that would have made her so. O Red!--and you never saw it!"
The hour went by. The broken leg was set and bandaged, the injured man
was conveyed back to the wagon which had brought him; and Red Pepper
Burns took a last look at his patient, in the light of the lantern
carried by the countryman.
"You've been game as any fighting man, Tom," said he, cheerily. "The
drive home'll be no midsummer-night's-dream, but I see that upper lip of
yours is stiff for it. Good-night--and good luck! We'll take care of the
luck."
As he turned back up the path the front door of his house swung open. It
was a door he had never entered more than once, his offices being in the
wing, and the upright portion having been totally unused since he had
owned the place. With an exclamation he was up the steps in two leaps,
and standing still upon the threshold.
"Come in a little farther, please, dear," said a voice from behind the
door, "so I can close it."
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