with soft-muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor
innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping
stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber
fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves,
six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with
excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were
to take place at eight o'clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest
ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on
a far faint hillside, a far faint streak of April green went roaming
jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were
plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched
mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her
abnormally jaded senses.

Taken all in all it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired
and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general
phenomenon of anything--except April!

In the real country, they tell me, where the Young Spring runs wild and
bare as a nymph through every dull brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the
blas