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“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.”

“Why? To have them read in my face what I’ve been, and go back home to die of shame?”

The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl’s face.

“There–there is nothing in your face to hurt them,” she said, flushing–because there were some things the Probationer had never discussed, even with herself. “You–look sad. Honestly, that’s all.”

The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was still yellow from cigarettes.

“What about that?” she sneered.

“If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?”

“I’ll–perhaps,” was the most the Probationer could get.

Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in the Avenue Girl’s eyes the terrible longing for the things she had given up–for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.

“What day is it?” the Avenue Girl asked once.

“Friday.”

“That’s baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?” Or: “That’s a pretty shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the dairy, wouldn’t it?”

“Fine!” said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph in her eyes.

III

That was the day the Dummy stole the parrot. The parrot belonged to the Girl; but how did he know it? So many things he should have known the Dummy never learned; so many things he knew that he seemed never to have learned! He did not know, for instance, of Father Feeny and the Holy Name students; but he knew of the Avenue Girl’s loneliness and heartache, and of the cabal against her. It is one of the black marks on record against him that he refused to polish the plate on Old Maggie’s bed, and that he shook his fist at her more than once when the Senior was out of the ward.