“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 vainly 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 sandpaper.”  There was no protest in her voice, nor 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.

“And I’d named her—­for you!” she said.  “I’d named her—­Patience—­for you!”

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior Surgeon’s face.

“Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific!” she pleaded desperately.  “Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific at all!  But up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we—­we name a young animal—­for the virtue that that person—­seems to need the most.  And if you tend the young animal carefully—­and train it right—!  Why—­it’s just a superstition, of course, but—­Oh, sir!” she floundered hopelessly, “the virtue you needed most in your business was what I meant!  Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!”

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed.  Embarrassment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarrassment and the anger,—­but no possible trace of amusement.  Impatiently he glanced up at the fast speeding clock.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “I’m an hour late now!” Scowling like a pirate he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain instant.  Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.

“See here, Miss—­Bossy Tamer,” he said.  “If the Superintendent is willing, go get your hat and coat, and I’ll take you out on that meningitis case with me.  It’s a thirty mile run if it’s a block, and I guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your brain—­if anything will,” he finished not unkindly.