how do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse? How does anybody
know? Oh, Zillah! Save me! Save me!"

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work, and laughed. Her
laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleighbells in mid-summer,
vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

"Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?" she
questioned blandly. "For Heaven's sake, the only thing you need is to go
back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in
Creation's the matter with you lately, anyway? Oh, of course, you've had
rotten luck this past month, but what of it? That's the trouble with you
country girls. You haven't got any stamina."

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into
the center of the room. "Country girls," she repeated blankly. "Why,
you're a country girl yourself!"

"I _am_ not!" snapped Zillah Forsyth. "I'll have you understand that
there are nine thousand people in the town I come from--and not a rube
among them. Why I tended soda fountain in the swellest drug-store there
a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn't as
green--when I was six months old--as you are now!"

Slowly with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment she raised her slim
white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther
down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then
snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist began with
extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective
bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the