“Nothing but moonshine!” he muttered. “Nothing in the world but too much coffee dope taken on an empty stomach—‘empty brain,’ I’d better have said. When will you girls ever learn any sense?” With search-light shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard, gray lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. “Next time you set out to have a ‘brain-storm,’ Miss Malgregor,” he suggested satirically, “try to have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in the world. Bah!” he ejaculated fiercely. “If you are going to fuss like this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are you going to do some fine day when, out of a perfectly clear and clean sky, security itself turns septic, and you lose the President of the United States or a mother of nine children—with a hang-nail?”
“But I wasn’t fussing, sir!” protested Rae Malgregor, with a timid sort of dignity. “Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for anything.” Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn, flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even at this moment.
“For Heaven’s sake, stop crackling that brown paper!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.
“But I wasn’t crackling the brown paper, sir! It’s crackling itself,” persisted Rae Malgregor, very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of misery. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?” she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. “Oh, can’t I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say, all I was trying to explain, was that I don’t want to be a trained nurse—after all.”
“Why not?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, with a rather noisy click of his glove fasteners.
“Because—my face is tired,” said the girl, quite simply.
The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon’s countenance seemed to be directed suddenly at the Superintendent.
“Is this an afternoon tea?” he asked tartly. “With six major operations this morning, and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this afternoon, I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical nurse.” Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. “You’re a fool,” he said, and started for the door.
Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road, and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy eyebrows.