“But you didn’t?”

“If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have gone.  But I couldn’t think it out—­I was too dead tired.  That is the chief feature of your first months in hospital—­the utter helpless fatigue at night.  You go to bed aching and you wake up aching.  If you are healthy as I was, it doesn’t hurt you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep you must.  Even that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty.  Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me.  Oh!  I was so grateful to her!  I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with delight.  And—­then—­somehow I pulled through.  The enormous interest of the work seized me—­I grew ambitious—­they pushed me on rapidly—­everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy—­and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world.”

“A curious experience,” said Hallin.  “I suppose you had never obeyed any one in your life before?”

“Not since I was at school—­and then—­not much!”

Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair.  How richly human the face had grown!  It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman, had very much disappeared.  It seemed to him absorbed in something new—­something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and the pain of growth.

“How long have you been at work to-day?” he asked her.

“I went at eleven last night.  I came away at four this afternoon.”

Hallin exclaimed, “You had food?”

“Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?” she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air.  “And don’t suppose that such a case occurs often.  It is a very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all.”

“Can you tell me what the case was?”

She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with Dr. Blank.

“I suppose he will make a fuss,” she said, with a restless look, “and that I shall be blamed.”

“I should think your second doctor will take care of that!” said Hallin.

“I don’t know.  I couldn’t help it.  But it is one of our first principles not to question a doctor.  And last week too I got the Association into trouble.  A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of had to be removed to hospital.  She asked me to cut her hair.  It was matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the ward.  So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one to meet the doctor and help get her off.