“Yes,” said Rae Malgregor, very timidly. “It’s my motto.”
“Your motto?” sniffed the Superintendent.
“Your motto?” chuckled the Senior Surgeon.
“Yes, my motto,” repeated Rae Malgregor, with the slightest perceptible tinge of resentment. “And it’s a perfectly good motto, too. Only, of course, it hasn’t got any style to it. That’s why I didn’t want the girls to see it,” she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. “My father gave it to me,” she announced briskly, “and my father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I’d never once been bumptious all my three years here, he’d give me a heifer. And—”
“Well, I guess you’ve lost your heifer,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.
“Lost my heifer?” gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous, she stood for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent’s face to the Senior Surgeon’s. “You mean,” she stammered—“you mean that I’ve been bumptious just now? You mean that, after all these years of meachin’ meekness, I’ve lost?”
Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue-paper. No power on earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she tried to cover her face.
“And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful’ cunning,” she confided mumblingly. “And it ate from my hand, all warm and sticky, like loving sand-paper.” There was no protest in her voice, or any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously, with the air of one who just as a matter of spiritual tidiness would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness, into the Senior Surgeon’s scowling scrutiny.
Plates in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson