“What do you mean?” he said, “don’t you know your place?”

The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.

“Yes—­I know my place!”

Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she had to say.  She knew—­and he could not deny—­that he had endangered his patient’s life.  She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it again.  Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.  His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.

Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for an instant he would have struck her.  Finally he turned down his shirt-cuffs and walked away.

“You understand,” he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his hand, “that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the doctor.  I shall now write a report to your superintendent.”

“As you please,” said Marcella, quietly.  And she went to the door and opened it.

He passed her sneering: 

“A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.  I’d sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!”

Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening.  “Will you go?” she said.

He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside, breathing threats.

Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.  There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth and strain.

Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking.  In another minute or two she would be besieged by them.  She called sharply, “Benny!”

Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses to right and left.

“What is it you want, Nuss?  No, she don’t want none o’ you—­there!”

And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in all their faces, but that Marcella said to him—­

“Let in Mrs. Levi, please.”

The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was admitted, and then the key was turned.  Marcella scribbled a line on a half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with it.

“I have sent for a new doctor,” she explained, still frowning and white, to Mrs. Levi.  “That one was not fit.”

The woman’s olive-skinned face lightened all over.  “Thanks to the Lord!” she said, throwing up her hands.  “But how in the world did you do ’t, miss?  There isn’t a single soul in this house that doesn’t go all of a tremble at the sight of ’im.  Yet all the women has ’im when they’re ill—­bound to.  They thinks he must be clever, ’cos he’s such a brute.  I do believe sometimes it’s that.  He is a brute!”