To revert to what was said a moment ago, it may be urged that no sufficient cause is shown for Miriam’s determination.  What had she undergone?  A little poverty, a little love affair, a little sickness.  But what brought Paul to the disciples at Damascus?  A light in the sky and a vision.  What intensity of light, what brilliancy of vision, would be sufficient to change the belief and the character of a modern man of the world or a professional politician?  Paul had that in him which could be altered by the pathetic words of the Crucified One, “I am He whom thou persecutest.”  The man of the world or the politician would evade an appeal from the heaven of heavens, backed by the glory of seraphim and archangel.  Miriam had a vitality, a susceptibility or fluidity of character—­call it what you will—­which did not need great provocation.  There are some mortals on this earth to whom nothing more than a certain, summer morning very early, or a certain chance idea in a lane ages ago, or a certain glance from a fellow-creature dead for years, has been the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or the Descent of the Holy Ghost.

A man now old and nearing his end is known to Miriam’s biographer, who one Sunday November afternoon, when he was but twenty years old, met a woman in a London street and looked in her face.  Neither he nor she stopped for an instant; he looked in her face, passed on, and never saw her again.  He married, had children, who now have children, but that woman’s face has never left him, and the colours of the portrait which hangs in his soul’s oratory are as vivid as ever.  A thousand times has he appealed to it; a thousand times has it sat in judgment; and a thousand times has its sacred beauty redeemed him.

Miriam wrote to Miss Tippit expressing her newly-formed wish.  Miss Tippit, with some doubts as to her friend’s fitness for the duty, promised to do what she could; and at last, after complete recovery, Miriam was allowed to begin a kind of apprenticeship to the art of nursing in a small hospital, recommended by Miss Tippit’s friend, the doctor.  One morning, a bright day in June, she was taken there.  When the door opened, there was disclosed a long white room with beds on either side, and a broad passage down the middle.  The walls were relieved by a few illuminated sentences, scriptural and secular; women dressed in a blue uniform were moving about noiselessly, and one of the physicians on the staff, with some students or assistants, was standing beside a patient happily unconscious, and demonstrating that he could not live.  Round one of the beds a screen was drawn; Miriam did not quite know what it meant, but she guessed and shuddered.  She passed on to a little room at the end, and here she was introduced to her new mistress, the lady-superintendent.  She was a small, well-formed woman of about thirty, with a pale thin face, lightish brown hair, grey eyes, and thinnish lips.  She also was dressed in uniform,