“Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?” she demanded.

The interne considered.

“It isn’t healing—­not very fast anyhow,” he said.  “If we could get a little skin to graft on you’d be all right in a jiffy.  Can’t you get some friends to come in?  It isn’t painful and it’s over in a minute.”

“Friends?  Where would I get friends of that sort?”

“Well, relatives then—­some of your own people?”

The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.

“None that I’d care to see,” she said.  And the Probationer knew she lied.  The interne shrugged his shoulders.

“If you think of any let me know.  We’ll get them here,” he said briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.

“Please!” she said, and held out a bare white arm.  The interne stared at it stupefied.  It was very lovely.

“I am not at all afraid,” urged the Probationer, “and my blood is good.  It would grow—­I know it would.”

The interne had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow.  The dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone.  To keep his voice steady he became stern.

“Put your sleeve down and don’t be a foolish girl!” he, commanded.  “Put your sleeve down!” His eyes said:  “You wonder!  You beauty!  You brave little girl!”

Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the interne worked out a plan.

“I’ve fixed it, I think,” he said, meeting her in a hallway where he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known she was coming.  “Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him.  He’s got a lot of students—­fellows studying for the priesthood—­and he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay ’em alive.”

“But—­is she a daughter of the church?” asked the Probationer.  “And even if she were, under the circumstances——­”

“What circumstances?” demanded the interne.  “Here’s a poor girl burned and suffering.  The father is not going to ask whether she’s of the anointed.”

The Probationer was not sure.  She liked doing things in the open and with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing.  Her chief trouble, after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.

“I don’t want to get well,” she said wearily when the thing was put up to her.  “What’s the use?  I’d just go back to the same old thing; and when it got too strong for me I’d end up here again or in the morgue.”

“Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them.”