style="font-size:15px;"> "Where!" I asked sarcastically. "To the matinée?"
"To the Zoo," she replied, and hauling down her bonnet from the cupboard, stuck it on her head. "Shall we need a taxicab?"
"Probably, if you intend to go out in your nightgown," I said coldly.
But if I expected Tish to be confused, I was disappointed. With her bonnet still on, she put on her shoes and stockings, her black broadcloth skirt, a lamb's wool vest and her long fur coat. It wasn't until she was finished that she remembered her nightgown underneath everything.
"It's a little long, isn't it?" she said, when she'd started for the door, with six inches of white trailing all around her. "Pin it up, Lizzie; that's a good girl."
"I'll do nothing of the sort," I said. "If you want to make a goose of yourself with a knee that you are forbidden to step on, and maybe a taxicab accident with you fixed like that underneath, I'm not going to be a party to it."
"Very well!" said Tish', and getting a pair 'of scissors, she was about to cut off eight inches of her best French gown, when I weakened and got the safety pins. It was plain, Tish was in no mood to stop at trifles. I made her as respectable as possible, at least on the surface, and by that time, seeing she was determined to go, I got ready and went with her.
Now, a patient can't leave a hospital without a card being sent down, signed by the interne and countersigned by the superintendent, and brought back by the elevator boy for the signatures of his family, his friends and the police bureau, or something almost as complicated. But not knowing anything of this, Tish and I went down in the elevator, past the door-man and out the front door, called a taxicab and drove away with perfect ease and calmness.
We went to the Zoo. That is generally known now, although that Tish went in her nightgown is here for the first time set forth. But what we did at the Zoo I do not know exactly. I might as well have been back with Aggie, being bathed and talcumed. Tish let me pay the taxicab, pointed to a chair in the ante-room, and spent twenty minutes in the private office of the superintendent
I was rather bitter about it. In the first place, I don't like Zoos, and in the second place, after I had been there ten minutes, a man in uniform came in and examined all the corners of the room and turned over every chair. When he came to the one I was in, he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but you haven't noticed a small green snake with red and yellow markings anywhere around here, have you?"
I was frozen in my chair.
"No," I replied as calmly as I possibly could, "Unless I absent-mindedly put him in my handbag!"
"Oh, I didn't mean that, lady," he hastened to explain, "I meant—he may be curled on the rungs of your chair."
I got up at that almost instantaneously and he tilted the chair over. "Not here," he said, disappointed. "Little devil, this is the third time this week!"
Is he—is he poisonous?" I asked. Well," he said thoughtfully, "personally, I shouldn't care to sit down on him in the dark."
He went out and dosed the door, and when Tish came back, she declares I was standing in the middle of the room with my skirts held up, and turning slowly around in a circle.
There was a glitter in Tish's eye that I had never seen there before, as we drove back to the hospital. I attempted to explain a little of how I felt at being left in a place like that, where at any moment something might break loose for the third time that week, and why I was turning around, but she told me tartly not to bother her.
We returned to the hospital in silence, and I paid for the taxicab. It was not until we were back in Tish's room, and had put her into her chair and got a hot-water bottle under her knee, which had gone on a strike about that time and refused to bend at all, that I spoke.
"Well?" I asked.
"Well—what?"
"Have they lost anything? Any animals?"
"No," said Tish calmly. "I knew that before I went there. Aggie, what day was it the two medical internes left?"
"This is Friday," I said. "It was Tuesday evening, Tish."
"I thought so," she observed. "Now reach me my notes, Lizzie, and go call Bates."
Chapter XVI.
Tommy Tells Why
Bates came unwillingly. His shrewd face was pale and twitching, and he insisted on knowing why he was wanted.
"I can not tell you, because I do not know, Mr. Bates," I said. "Miss Carberry wants to speak to you. That is all."
"I haven't time," he said. "I'm helping out in the wards to-day. One of the day orderlies has to take Mr. Briggs' place to-night, and he has gone to bed to get some sleep."
But I got him to go finally, and we went together along the hall, his carpet-slippers flap-ping loosely as he walked, his shirt open at. the throat and showing his lean brown neck. I thought to myself uneasily that the man looked like, at least, a potential criminal him-self. But just as we reached Tish's door Tommy came out
I sent Bates in, for Tommy had put his hand on my arm,
"What has she been up to?" he asked, as the door closed "She's sitting in there in a kimono, with her foot on a stool, and she's got her bonnet on,"
"We've been out," I said tartly. "Or she's been out. I only went along. We went to the Zoo, Tommy, and she left me to sit on snakes with green and red markings—"
"What!"
"Well, it only happened that L didn't And she's got hold of something: I never saw her in such a state,"
"The Zoo!" cried Tommy and whistled. Then he smiled. "I see," he said; "The Murders in the Rue Morgue, eh? Well, what happened?"
"I haven't any idea. She's got some sort of a scent, and she's got her nose to the ground and running like mad. If she's interfered with to-day, shell bite."
"I see," said Tommy again thoughtfully. "Well, good luck to her."
"How is Miss Blake?"
He lowered his voice. "She's conscious, but don't tell Aunt Tish, please. She wants to ask her some questions, and I don't want her disturbed. She's very weak." He looked down at a little case he had in his hand, and then at me. "I'm going to give her a hypodermic," he said, "and the nurse is doing something else. Would you mind coming over with me?"
Well, of course, I'd wanted to hear what Tish asked Bates, but as I've admitted before, I'm a good bit of a fool where there's a love affair on hand, and I'm fond of Tommy.
"All right," I said, and we went. I thought I heard Tish's voice raised angrily as we left the door, but the next moment there was only the quiet hum of Bates speaking.
The little nurse was lying in bed with her eyes closed. She looked white, but her lips had more color than the day before. She opened her eyes as we came in, and put out her hand to me.
"You're
