Margaret MacLean closed the book with a bang; for five minutes the children had been looking straight ahead with big, conscious eyes, hearing not a word.  Rebellion gripped at her heart and she rose quickly and went over to the group.

“Wouldn’t you like to come in and talk to the children?  They are rather sober this afternoon; perhaps you could make them laugh.”

“Yes, wouldn’t you like to go in?” put in the Oldest Trustee.  “They are very nice children.”

But the visitors shrank back an almost infinitesimal distance; and one said, hesitatingly: 

“I’m afraid we wouldn’t know quite what to say to them.”

“Perhaps you would like to see the new pictures for the nurses’ room?” the nurse in charge suggested, wistfully.

The Oldest Trustee glanced at her with a hint of annoyance.  “We have already seen them.  I think you must have forgotten, my dear, that it was I who gave them.”

With flashing cheeks Margaret MacLean fled from Ward C. If she had stayed long enough to watch the little gray wisp of a woman move quietly from cot to cot, patting each small hand and asking, tenderly, “And what is your name, dearie?” she might have carried with her a happier feeling.  At the door of the board-room she ran into the House Surgeon.

“Is it as bad as all that?” he asked after one good look at her.

“It’s worse—­a hundred times worse!” She tossed her head angrily.  “Do you know what is going to happen some day?  I shall forget who I am—­and who they are and what they have done for me—­and say things they will never forgive.  My mind-string will just snap, that’s all; and every little pestering, forbidden thought that has been kicking its heels against self-control and sense-of-duty all these years will come tumbling out and slip off the edge of my tongue before I even know it is there.”

“They are some hot little thoughts, I wager,” laughed the House Surgeon.

And then, from the far end of the cross-corridor, came the voice of the Oldest Trustee, talking to the group: 

“. . . such a very sweet girl—­never forgets her place or her duty.  She was brought here from the Foundling Asylum when she was a baby, in almost a dying condition.  Every one thought it was an incurable case; the doctors still shake their heads over her miraculous recovery.  Of course it took years; and she grew up in the hospital.”

With a look of dumb, battling anger the nurse in charge of Ward C turned from the House Surgeon—­her hands clenched—­while the voice of the Oldest Trustee came back to them, still exhibiting: 

“No, we have never been able to find out anything about her parentage; undoubtedly she was abandoned.  We named her ‘Margaret MacLean,’ after the hospital and the superintendent who was here then.  Yes, indeed—­a very, very sad—­”

When the Oldest Trustee reached the boardroom it was empty, barring the primroses, which were guilelessly nodding in the green Devonshire bowl on the President’s desk.