"Don't laugh at me. You've always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so to have any respect for me, I guess. You've got your work," he waved his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting, "and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I'm a poor rudderless creature without any hope or direction." He buried his face in his hands. "You don't know it," he said, with an effort to conceal the fact that his shoulders were shaking, "but you see before you a human soul in the actual process of dissolution." Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to her breast. "Put it here where it belongs," she said softly. "Do you mean it?" he whispered. "Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your heart?" "Yes, my dear." "Praise the Lord." "I snitched him," Gertrude confided to Margaret some days later,--her whole being radiant and transfigured with happiness. "You snitch David." CHAPTER XXIII THE YOUNG NURSE The local hospital of the village of Harmonville, which was ten miles from Harmon proper, where the famous boarding-school for young ladies was located, presented an aspect so far from institutional that but for the sign board tacked modestly to an elm tree just beyond the break in the hedge that constituted the main entrance, the gracious, old colonial structure might have been taken for the private residence for which it had served so many years. It was a crisp day in late September, and a pale yellow sun was spread thin over the carpet of yellow leaves with which the wide lawn was covered. In the upper corridor of the west wing, grouped about the window-seat with their embroidery or knitting, the young nurses were talking together in low tones during the hour of the patients' siestas. The two graduates, dark-eyed efficient girls, with skilled delicate fingers taking precise stitches in the needlework before them, were in full uniform, but the younger girls clustered about them, beginners for the most part, but a few months in training, were dressed in the simple blue print, and little white caps and aprons, of the probationary period. The atmosphere was very quiet and peaceful. A light breeze blew in at the window and stirred a straying lock or two that escaped the starched band of a confining cap. Outside the stinging whistle of the insect world was interrupted now and then by the cough of a passing motor. From the doors opening on the corridor an occasional restless moan indicated the inability of some sufferer to take his dose of oblivion according to schedule. Presently a bell tinkled a summons to the patient in the first room on the right--a gentle little old lady who had just had her appendix removed. "Will you take that, Miss Hamlin?" the nurse in charge of the case asked the tallest and fairest of the young assistants.