"No. May I come in? I want to see your mistress."
The negress did not admit her, however. She let her stand in the vestibule and went back to the foot of a staircase.
"One of these heah nurses from the hospital!" she said. "She wants to come in and speak to you."
"Let her in, you fool!" replied a voice from above stairs.
The rest was rather confused. Afterward the Probationer remembered putting the case to the stout woman who had claimed the parrot and finding it difficult to make her understand.
"Don't you see?" she finished desperately. "I want her to go home—to her own folks. She wants it too. But what are we going to say about these last two years?"
The stout woman sat turning over her rings. She was most uncomfortable. After all, what had she done? Had she not warned them again and again about having lighted cigarettes lying round.
"She's in bad shape, is she?"
"She may recover, but she'll be badly scarred—not her face, but her chest and shoulders."
That was another way of looking at it. If the girl was scarred——