“And he went away very sudden at the last,” she finished hurriedly.  “It seems he was married all the time.”  Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light.  “And—­I hope he goes to Hell!” she added perfectly simply.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

“Oh, Zillah!” she began.  “Oh, poor Zillah dear!  I’m so—­sorry!  I’m so—­”

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

“I don’t know what particular call you’ve got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill,” she drawled languidly.  “I’ve got my character, same as you’ve got yours.  And just about nine times as many good looks.  And when it comes to nursing—­” Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl’s immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion.  “And when it comes to nursing?  Ha!  Helene Churchill!  You can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk!  But when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients’ hands on their breasts and murmur ’Thy will be done,’—­why, that’s the time that little ‘yours truly’ is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work!”

With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar.  “It isn’t you, Helene Churchill,” she taunted, “that’s ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases—­and the small-pox!  Gee!  You like nursing because you think it’s pious to like it!  But I like it—­because I like it!" From brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness.  “The smell of ether!” she stammered.  “It’s like wine to me!  The clang of the ambulance gong?  I’d rather hear it than fire-engines!  I’d crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation!  I wish there was a war!  I’d give my life to see a cholera epidemic!”

Abruptly as it came the passion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent.  With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

“Now, Little One,” she mocked, “tell us the story of your lovely life.  Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had such a crush on this world,—­and Helene here brazenly affirm that she went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to come,—­it’s up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take up so noble an endeavor!  Had you seen some of the young house doctors’ beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue?  Or was it for the sake of the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray mug that you jilted your poor plow-boy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?”