For a long time now, McGuire had sat there without moving, sprawled out upon the desk in a kind of drunken stupor. About half-past three the telephone upon the desk began to ring, jangling the hospital silence with its ominous and insistent clangour, but the big burly figure of the man did not stir, he made no move to answer. Presently he heard the brisk heel-taps of Creasman, the night superintendent, coming along the heavy oiled linoleum of the corridor. She entered, glanced quickly at him, and saying, “Shall I take it?” picked up the phone, took the receiver from its hook, said “hello” and listened for a moment. He did not move.

In a moment, the night superintendent said quietly:

“Yes, I’ll ask him.”

When she spoke to him, however, her tone had changed completely from the cool professional courtesy of her speech into the telephone: putting the instrument down upon the top of the desk, and covering the mouth-piece with her hand, she spoke quietly to him, but with a note of cynical humour in her voice, bold, coarse, a trifle mocking.

“It’s your wife,” she said. “What shall I tell her?”

He regarded her stupidly for a moment before he answered.

“What does she want?” he grunted.

She looked at him with hard eyes touched with pity and regret.

“What do you think a woman wants?” she said. “She wants to know if you are coming home tonight.”

He stared at her and then grunted:

“Won’t go home.”

She took her hand away from the mouth-piece instantly, and taking up the phone again, spoke smoothly, quietly, with cool crisp courtesy:

“The doctor will not be able to go home tonight, Mrs. McGuire. He has to operate at seven-thirty. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . At seven-thirty. . . . He has decided it is best to stay here until the operation is over. . . . Yes. . . . I’ll tell him. . . . Thank YOU. . . . Good-bye.”

She hung up quietly and then turning to him, her hands arched cleanly on starched hips, she looked at him for a moment with a bold sardonic humour.

“What did she say?” he mumbled thickly.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “Nothing at all. What else is there to say?”

He made no answer but just kept staring at her in his bloated drunken way with nothing but the numb swelter of that irremediable anguish in his heart. In a moment, her voice hardening imperceptibly, the nurse spoke quietly again:

“Oh, yes — and I forgot to tell you — you had another call tonight.”

He moistened his thick lips, and mumbled:

“Who was it?”

“It was that woman of yours.”

There was no sound save the stertorous labour of his breath; he stared at her with his veined and yellowed eyes, and grunted stolidly:

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to know if the doc-taw was theah,” Creasman said in a coarse and throaty parody of refinement. “And is he coming in tonight? Really, I should like to know. . . . Ooh, yaas,” Creasman went on throatily, adding a broad stroke or two on her own account. “I simply must find out! I cawn’t get my sleep in until I do. . . . Well,” she demanded harshly, “what am I going to tell her if she calls again?”

“What did she say to tell me?”

“She said”— the nurse’s tone again was lewdly tinged with parody — “to tell you that she is having guests for dinner tomorrow night — this evening — and that you simply GOT to be th?h, you, and your wife, too — ooh, Gawd, yes! — the Reids are comin’, don’t-cherknow — and if you are not th?h Gawd only knows what will happen!”

He glowered at her drunkenly for a moment, and then, waving thick fingers at her in disgust, he mumbled:

“You got a dirty mouth . . . don’t become you. . . . Unlady-like. . . . Don’t like a dirty-talkin’ woman. . . . Never did. . . . Unbecomin’. . . . Unlady-like. . . . Nurses all alike . . . all dirty talkers . . . don’t like ’em.”

“Oh, dirty talkers, your granny!” she said coarsely. “Now you leave the nurses alone. . . . They’re decent enough girls, most of ’em, until they come here and listen to you for a month or two. . . . You listen to me, Hugh McGuire; don’t blame the nurses. When it comes to dirty talking, you can walk off with the medals any day in the week. . . . Even if I am your cousin, I had a good Christian raising out in the country before I came here. So don’t talk to me about nurses’ dirty talk: after a few sessions with you in the operating room even the Virgin Mary could use language fit to make a monkey blush. So don&rs............