“Yes, I rang,” said the Superintendent.  “Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately.”

“The Senior Surgeon?” gasped Rae Malgregor.  “The Senior Surgeon?” With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support.  Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.

“Oh, now I’m going to be expelled!  Oh, now I know I’m going to be—­expelled!” she moaned listlessly.

Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man.  Gray-haired, gray-bearded, gray-suited, grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.

“I’m in a hurry,” he growled.  “What’s the matter?”

Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.

“Oh, there’s—­nothing at all the matter, sir,” she stammered.  “It’s only—­it’s only that I’ve just decided that I don’t want to be a trained nurse.”

With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside.

“Dr. Faber,” she said, “won’t you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy’s death last week was in no conceivable way her fault,—­that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible.”

“Why, what nonsense!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.  “What—!”

“And the Portuguese woman the week before that,” interrupted Rae Malgregor dully.

“Stuff and nonsense!” said the Senior Surgeon.  “It’s nothing but coincidence!  Pure coincidence!  It might have happened to anybody!”

“And she hasn’t slept for almost a fortnight.” the Superintendent confided, “nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make out, except just black coffee.  I’ve been expecting this break-down for some days.”

“And-the-young-drug-store-clerk-the-week-before-that,” Rae Malgregor resumed with sing-song monotony.

Brusquely the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and taking the girl by her shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm, authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its inordinately dilated pupil.  Equally brusquely he turned away again.

“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 searchlight 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