“Why yes, at times I have heard of the pure light.” “Oh, God!” said Plucritus, and he laughed. “Oh, God!” CHAPTER XII The years glided by fairly smoothly so far as outward events were concerned. Maggie won a scholarship which enabled her to take a three years’ course at a better school—and Deborah afterwards won the same. Maggie became a pupil-teacher in the school where they had gone when they first came to the town, and afterwards Deborah became a pupil-teacher there too. Deborah did not like teaching; it had only been in father’s lifetime that it had appeared to her the least bit nice. You see she had a great many infirmities, some easily discernible, some less so. But there was nothing else that she could be, so the inevitable had to be accepted. Not that she was distinctly unhappy at teaching, far from it. “If there is one class of people I despise it’s the people who grumble at the work they have to do,” she used to say. “Pride alone should keep them from it.” So whenever anyone asked her how she liked teaching she always said, “Very much indeed;” but if they still asked if there was anything she would like to be better than a teacher she always told the truth and said, “Yes—a nurse.” She had quite made up her mind that when she had passed all the examinations necessary for teaching, and was old enough, she would go into training for a hospital nurse, because she loved to look after sick people. Sometimes some people, just for the sake of talking, probably, would press the question further and ask if she would like nursing best of anything, and then she would look at them and laugh, and say, “Yes, best of anything;” but they didn’t understand the look, and they didn’t understand the laugh, and so they let the matter be. Deborah at school had indeed always been reckoned a dreamer, and one teacher had made her life a species of mild misery by perpetually and unceasingly calling her by that name. Did she raise her pencil one minute from her work there would come across the class that everlasting voice,— “Now, Deborah, there you are again! dreaming as usual. Dear me! What a wonderful brain yours must be!” And the other girls would laugh; but because she had never been able to form a single friendship she could never join in. When she became a teacher she used often to ponder on these words. “Well, anyway, I can’t be so bad,” she used to think. “Because if any of these children talk or play or are lazy I know it at once, and if I never did anything else but dream I should never know it at all.” There was a deal of hard work to be done in those days too. It was in the days when pupil-teachers taught all day and learnt all night, and went early to school in the morning for an hour’s instruction. It was about this time that Jack and Deborah became very great friends. The friendship, on her side at least, grew out of gratitude.