o cot, patting each small hand and asking, tenderly,
"And what is your name, dearie?" she might have carried with her a
happier feeling. At the door of the board-room she ran into the House
Surgeon.

"Is it as bad as all that?" he asked after one good look at her.

"It's worse--a hundred times worse!" She tossed her head angrily. "Do
you know what is going to happen some day? I shall forget who I
am--and who they are and what they have done for me--and say things
they will never forgive. My mind-string will just snap, that's all;
and every little pestering, forbidden thought that has been kicking its
heels against self-control and sense-of-duty all these years will come
tumbling out and slip off the edge of my tongue before I even know it
is there."

"They are some hot little thoughts, I wager," laughed the House Surgeon.

And then, from the far end of the cross-corridor, came the voice of the
Oldest Trustee, talking to the group:

". . . such a very sweet girl--never forgets her place or her duty.
She was brought here from the Foundling Asylum when she was a baby, in
almost a dying condition. Every one thought it was an incurable case;
the doctors still shake their heads over her miraculous recovery. Of
course it took years; and she grew up in the hospital."

With a look of dumb, battling anger the nurse in charge of Ward C
turned from the House Surgeon--her hands clenched--while the voice of
the Oldest Trustee came back to them, still exhibiting:

"No, we have never been able to find out anything about her parentage;
undoubtedly she was abandoned. We named her 'Margaret MacLean,' after
the hospital and the superintendent who was here then. Yes, indeed--a
very, very sad--"

When the Oldest Trustee reached the boardroom it was empty, barring the
primroses, which were guilelessly nodding in the green Devonshire bowl
on the President's desk.

IV

CURABLES AND INCURABLES

No one who entered the board-room that late afternoon remembered that
it was May Eve; and even had he remembered, it would have amounted to
nothing more than the mental process of association. It would not have
given him the faintest presentiment that at that very moment the Little
People were busy pressing their cloth-o'-dream mantles and reblocking
their wishing-caps; that the instant the sun went down the spell would
be off the faery raths, setting them free all over the world, and that
the gates of Tir-na-n'Og would be op