Mrs. Red Pepper | Page 7

her own on this house."
"He's too busy to know or care what she does--till he sees it. I'll venture she has slipped in a penny or two. That magnificent piano is hers, you know,--and two or three pieces of furniture. All he'll realize is that it's delightful and that she's in it. It's all so funny, anyhow,--this bringing home a bride and having her fall to work to furnish her own nest."
"She's enjoyed it. I'd like to be on the scene to-night, when she shows it to him."
"No chance of that. When Red does get her to himself for ten minutes he quite plainly prefers to have the rest of us depart. Have you noticed?"
"Yes, indeed. I only hope that state of things will last." And Winifred smiled and sighed at once, as if she were skeptical concerning of the permanency of married bliss.
Office-hours were full ones that evening, and it was quite nine o'clock before R.P. Burns, M.D. closed the door on the last of his patients. The moment he was free he turned to Miss Mathewson, his office nurse, with a deep breath of relief.
"Let's put out the lights and call it off," he said. "Run home and get an hour to yourself before bedtime, and never mind finishing the books. Do you know,"--he was smiling down at her, where she sat, a trim white figure at her desk, an assistant who had been his right hand for nine years, and who perhaps knew his moods and tempers better than anybody in the world, though he did not at all realize this,--"do you know, I find it harder to settle down to work again than I thought I should? Curious, isn't it?"
"Not at all curious, Doctor Burns." Miss Mathewson spoke in her usual quiet tone, smiling in return. "It is distracting, even to me, to know that a person so lovely as your wife is under the same roof."
This was much for this most reserved associate of his to say, and Burns recognized it. He regarded her with interested astonishment. "So she's got you, too!" he ejaculated. "I'm mighty glad of that, for it will tend to make you sympathetic with my wish to have an hour to myself--and her--now and then. I'm to see my home to-night, for the first time,--if--"
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