He went into the kitchen and took off his jacket and draped it over the chair, feeling like an intruder in his own apartment as the conversation in the living room became a series of short whispered sentences and an occasional muted giggle.

There was bread, slightly stale, and the makings of a ham and cheese. There was also a Beefeater’s bottle less than half full, containing martinis, which he realized she would have removed from the refrigerator before his scheduled return from the hospital next morning.

He made the sandwich and opened a small bottle of ginger ale and carried them through the living room and into his son’s bedroom, closing the door against the curious stares of the two young people on the couch.

Miguel was asleep, a long orange stuffed serpent named Irving lying across his face, the pillow on the floor. He set the sandwich and the drink on the bureau and picked up the pillow and stood gazing at his son in the unsatisfactory dimness of the night light. Should he move the stuffed animal? He knew very well there was no danger of asphyxiation but he moved it anyway, giving him a chance to look at the small face. Miguel stirred but did not waken. The boy had dark, coarse hair worn Beatle-style even at the age of two and one-half, long in back and cut in a bang Liz loved and Rafe did not like at all. Liz’s uncle hated the haircut even more than he disliked the boy’s “foreign-sounding” name, for which he substituted the more acceptable Mike. Miguel had masculine, even ugly ears that protruded from his head and distressed his mother. Otherwise he was handsome, tough and wiry but with his mother’s fair skin and his paternal grandmother’s warm-blooded delicate features. The Señora. Mamacita.

The telephone rang.

He reached it before the baby-sitter and recognized Longwood’s precise tones without need of further identification.

“I thought you were on the ward tonight.”

“I came home to eat.”

Longwood inquired after several cases and Rafe reported, each aware there was no possibility that the Surgeon-in-Chief would attempt to assume active direction of the patient’s welfare. Against his ear in the background were restaurant noises, low murmur of voices, clink of metal against glass.

“May I say hello to Elizabeth?” Longwood said when Rafe was through.

“Isn’t she with you?”

“Good grief, was I supposed to meet her?”

“For dinner.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then the old boy tried hard. “Damn that secretary. That girl has my appointment book completely screwed up. I don’t know how I’ll ever explain to Elizabeth. Will you give her my most abject apologies?” The embarrassment in his voice was genuine, but there was more, and Rafe realized with sudden distaste that the additional ingredient was sympathy.

“I will,” he said.