If Sidney was puzzled, she kept it bravely to herself. In her little room
at night, with the door carefully locked, she tried to think things out.
There were a few treasures that she looked over regularly: a dried flower
from the Christmas roses; a label that he had pasted playfully on the back
of her hand one day after the rush of surgical dressings was over and which
said "Rx, Take once and forever."
There was another piece of paper over which Sidney spent much time. It was
a page torn out of an order book, and it read: "Sigsbee may have light
diet; Rosenfeld massage." Underneath was written, very small: "You are the most beautiful person in the world."
Two reasons had prompted Wilson to request to have Sidney in the
operating-room. He wanted her with him, and he wanted her to see him at
work: the age-old instinct of the male to have his woman see him at his
best.
He was in high spirits that first day of Sidney's operating-room
experience. For the time at least, Carlotta was out of the way. Her somber
eyes no longer watched him. Once he looked up from his work and glanced at
Sidney where she stood at strained attention.
"Feeling faint?" he said.
She colored under the eyes that were turned on her.
"No, Dr. Wilson."
"A great many of them faint on the first day. We sometimes have them lying
all over the floor."
He challenged Miss Gregg with his eyes, and she reproved him with a shake
of her head, as she might a bad boy.
One way and another, he managed to turn the attention of the operating-room
to Sidney several times. It suited his whim, and it did more than that: it
gave him a chance to speak to her in his teasing way.
Sidney came through the operation as if she had been through fire--taut as
a string, rather pale, but undaunted. But when the last case had been
taken out, Max dropped his bantering manner. The internes were looking over
instruments; the nurses were busy on the hundred and one tasks of clearing
up; so he had a chance for a word with her alone.
"I am proud of you, Sidney; you came through it like a soldier."
"You made it very hard for me."
A nurse was coming toward him; he had only a moment.
"I shall leave a note in the mail-box," he said quickly, and proceeded with
the scrubbing of his hands which signified the end of the day's work.