Abruptly in the doorway as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent's thin fingers another nurse appeared.
"Yes, I rang," said the Superintendent. "Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately."
"The Senior Surgeon?" gasped Rae Malgregor. "The Senior Surgeon?" With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.
"Oh, now I'm going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I'm going to be—expelled!" she moaned listlessly.
Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, gray-suited, grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.
"I'm in a hurry," he growled. "What's the matter?"
Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.
"Oh, there's—nothing at all the matter, sir," she stammered. "It's only—it's only that I've just decided that I don't want to be a trained nurse."
With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside.
"Dr. Faber," she said, "won't you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy's death last week was in no conceivable way her fault,—that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible."