began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two
scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an
hour to his running time; but nothing whatsoever to his conversational
ability.

"Father!" the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then
panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful
spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either
to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she
raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry. "Fat
Father! _Fat Father! F-a-t F-a-t-h-e-r!_" she screeched out frenziedly
at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling
gasp of strangulation under a murderer's reeking fingers,--catastrophe
unspeakable,--disaster now irrevocable!

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out
of his engine the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering
standstill.

"What is it?" he cried in real terror. "What is it?"

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse's lap
till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight.
Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper
into her big fur collar.

"For Heaven's sake, what do you want?" demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even
yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and