“See, Helene!  My new beau!” she giggled experimentally.

In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. “Your beau?” she corrected.  “Why, that’s Zillah’s picture.”

“Well, it’s mine now!” snapped Rae Malgregor with unexpected edginess.  “It’s mine now all right.  Zillah said I could have him!  Zillah said I could—­write to him—­if I wanted to!” she finished a bit breathlessly.

Wider and wider Helene Churchill’s eyes dilated.  “Write to a man—­whom you don’t know?” she gasped.  “Why, Rae!  Why, it isn’t even—­very nice—­to have a picture of a man you don’t know!”

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor’s tongue crept out in pink derision.  “Bah!” she taunted.  “What’s ‘nice’?  That’s the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill!  You never stop to consider whether anything’s fun or not; all you care is whether it’s ’nice’!” Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah’s sainted eyes.  “Bah!  What’s ’nice’?” she persisted a little lamely.  Then suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness.  “That’s—­the—­whole trouble with you, Zillah Forsyth!” she stammered.  “You never give a hang whether anything’s nice or not; all you care is whether it’s fun!” Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands.  “Oh, how do I know which one of you girls to follow?” she demanded wildly.  “How do I know anything?  How does anybody know anything?”

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there.  Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene Churchill’s face.  “How do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse, Helene Churchill?” she began all over again.  “How does anybody know she was really meant to be one?  How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?” Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched at the parchment in Helene Churchill’s hand.  “I mean—­where did you get your motto, Helene Churchill?” she persisted with increasing irritability.  “If—­you don’t tell me—­I’ll tear the whole thing to pieces!”

With a startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach.  “What’s the matter with you, Rae?” she quizzed sharply, and then turning round quite casually to her book-case began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning.  “Oh, I did so want to go to China,” she confided irrelevantly.  “But my family have just written me that they won’t stand for it.  So I suppose I’ll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead.”  With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor’s eyes.  “Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?” she asked.  A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her absent-mindedness.  “Oh!” she smiled, “you mean you want to know—­just what the incident was that first made me decide to—­devote my life to—­to humanity?”