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punch-line, and Dr. Eichner had to shrug to show it was all over; so the other could give a long, low whistle and kick his foot in the gravel.
    Stockton cleared his throat.
    “Where do you work, Doctor?” he asked evenly. “That is, just where is your practice at?”

Chapter IV
    W HEN E LEANOR T HORNE returned to the clinic, she found Babs lying on a couch in Nurses’ Lounge with a cold compress across her head. They had lost the patient in 28.
    It was the first death at the Clinic in more than a month, yet it was the first death where Nurse Mintner had been in direct attendance, for it was she who had injected the coagulants—which had failed to take—and the patient, an extremely old man, had literally died in her arms.
    After it was all over, Miss Mintner had come into the rest-room to clean her shoes and change her soiled habit and stockings—so much once toward the end had the old man bled from his nose and mouth.
    But, at last, while taking off the ruin of her pure habit, at the close stretched shell of it all broken soft now, and black blood red, even as gutter-razed the white frozen rose, she had become genuinely faint and laid herself down there on the mohair couch in Nurses’ Lounge. Later, Beth Jackson came to draw a sheet around her double, whereas Babs, as stifled and feverish, had pushed it aside, and now she lay uncovered in her nylon blue slip.
    As Eleanor Thorne entered, closing the door behind her, the girl stirred softly, her half shadowed face turned slightly aside, broken now by the white angled rise of her arm, hand to brow on the ice filled cloth, as if there had been, exactly then, a danger of it all slipping down across her eyes and nose.
    Nurse Thorne stood quiet by the couch, waiting, it would seem, simply to put her hand on Babs’ shoulder, she who fluttered a little under the touch, like a waking butterfly, then turned her eyes soft at Eleanor Thorne. “We lost 28,” she said and sobbed pitifully till the instant her eyes went great with the hopeless and overwhelming wonder of it, and her face moved slowly away into the pillow. “Oh why?” she begged. “Why? Why? ”
    Eleanor pressed at the bare shoulder gently. “Please,” she said in a firm voice. “Please.”
    But grimacing, Miss Mintner knotted her tiny fist and struck it softly against the pillow. “Why?” she demanded, resolute but still tearful.
    Nurse Thorne sat down on the edge of the couch, gradually massaging Barbara’s shoulder. “Please—please don’t Barbara.” And it was the first time she had called Miss Mintner by her given name. “He was very old,” she added in real sympathy, fingering the tracery of near lace at her shoulder—the way the young girl was lying, twisted on the couch, the strap could have seemed to be cutting the circulation from her left arm.
    Miss Mintner slowly brought herself around to face Nurse Thorne. “If only you’d been here,” and at the point her voice filled with tribute there was the slightest reproach in her eyes.
    “I know, dear,” said Eleanor turning her look abstractly to where her own fingers kneaded beneath the binding filigree. “I was held up at Bullock’s.”
    Precisely then, on a chance glance at the window past Nurse Thorne, Babs Mintner gave a small start, raising one hand to her mouth, but as quickly uncovering a brave smile and one bare shoulder for Garcia, he who was standing there on the terrace, looking in.
    “What on earth!” cried Eleanor Thorne, following her. She sailed to the window, shouting. “Garcia!” exactly as if she had expected him to turn and run, run from where she hovered above him, actually speechless for the moment, as he frowning what under these circumstances could have been certain disapproval, stood quite still. Then she managed such outrage for him, hands on her hips, the accusation so glaring it might sear straight through his breast, burning past the heart of every last furtive mangled-tongue degenerate crouched, small