"Yes," said Rae Malgregor very timidly. "It's my--motto."

"Your motto?" sniffed the Superintendent.

"Your motto?" chuckled the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, my motto," repeated Rae Malgregor with the slightest perceptible
tinge of resentment. "And it's a perfectly good motto, too! Only, of
course, it hasn't got any style to it. That's why I didn't want the
girls to see it," she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before
their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. "My Father
gave it to me," she announced briskly. "And my Father said that, when
I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I'd never once been
bumptious--all my three years here,--he'd give me a--heifer! And--"

"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.