n should--my nurse-maid for example? Is
she any healthier than I am?"

It was indiscreet of the doctor to look at her before he answered. Her
eyes were sparkling, the color bright in her cheeks; unconsciously, she
had flattened her shoulders back and drawn a good deep breath down into
her lungs. The doctor smiled a smile of surrender and turned back to
Rodney. "I'll confess," he said, "that in my experience, Mrs. Aldrich is
almost a _lusus naturae_--a perfectly sound, healthy woman."

Rose smiled widely and contentedly on the pair of them. "That's more
like it," she said to the doctor. "Thanks very much."

But after he had gone, she did not spring anything on Rodney, as he
fully expected she would. She took him out for a tramp through the park
in the dusk of a perfect autumn afternoon, and went to a musical show
with him in the evening. She might have been, as far as he could see,
the Rose of a year ago. She had the same lithe boyish swing. She even
wore, though he didn't know it, the same skirt for their walk in the
park that she had worn on some of their tramps before they were married.
And when they had had their evening at the theater, and a bite of supper
somewhere, and come home, she let him drop off to sleep without a word
that would explain her insistence on getting a clean bill of health from
the doctor.

But the next morning, while Doris was busy in the laundry, she found
Mrs. Ruston in the nursery and had a talk with that lady, which was
destined to produce seismic upheavals.

"I've decided to make a little change in our arrangements, Mrs. Ruston,"
she said. "But I don't think it's one that will disturb you very much.
I'm going to let Doris go--I'll get her another place, of course--and do
her work myself."

Mrs. Ruston compressed her lips, and went on for a minute with what she
was doing to one of the twins, as if she hadn't heard.

"Doris is quite satisfactory, madam," she said at last. "I'd not advise
making a change. She's a dependable young woman, as such go. Of course I
watch her very close."

"I think I can promise to be dependable," Rose said. "I don't know much
about babies, of course, but I think I can learn as well as Doris.
Anyhow, I can wheel them about and wash their clothes and boil bottles
and things as well as she does. For the rest, you can tell me what to do
just as you tell her."

Mrs. Ruston took a considerably longer interval to digest this reply.
"Then you're meaning to give