Still staring worriedly out over the old city’s slate-gray head to that inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon she felt her whole being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all Hushed Places.  Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable impulse to sing, to shout, to scream from the housetops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break laws, dishes, heads,—­anything in fact that would break with a crash!  And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged world at her heels, to run!  And run!  And run!  And run!  And run!  And laugh!  Till her feet raveled out!  And her lungs burst!  And there was nothing more left of her at all,—­ever—­ever—­any more!

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all awhiff with ether, awhirr with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

“Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!” she cried furiously.  “Get out of here—­quick!—­and leave me alone!  I want to think!”

Perfectly serenely the newcomer advanced into the room.  With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite, composite picture of all the saints of history.  Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.

“Oh, Fudge!” she drawled.  “What’s eating you, Rae Malgregor?  I won’t either get out!  It’s my room just as much as it is yours!  And Helene’s just as much as it is ours!  And besides,” she added more briskly, “it’s four o’clock now, and with graduation at eight and the dance afterwards, if we don’t get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?” Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh.  Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking voice.  “Say, Rae!” she confided.  “That minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as ‘Sanctity’ for a stained-glass window in his new church!  Isn’t he the softie?”

“Shall—­you—­do—­it?” quizzed Rae Malgregor a trifle tensely.

“Shall I do it?” mocked the newcomer.  “Well, you just watch me!  Four mornings a week in June—­at full week’s wages?  Fresh Easter lilies every day?  White silk angel-robes?  All the high-souls and high-paints kowtowing around me?  Why it would be more fun than a box of monkeys!  Sure I’ll do it!”

Expeditiously as she spoke the newcomer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror and yanking it down with one single tug began to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord.  Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook her slender figure curved to the task.  Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. You’ll Be a Long Time Dead! glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.