“Well!” exclaimed Lloyd in some astonishment, “it seems to me that one should confine typhoid easily enough.”

“Not always, not always,” answered the other; “a virulent case would be quite as bad as yellow fever or smallpox.  You remember when we were at the hospital Miss Helmuth, that little Polish nurse, contracted it from her case and died even before her patient did.  Then there was Eva Blayne.  She very nearly died.  I did like the way Miss Wakeley took this case out at Medford even when the other nurse had died.  She never hesitated for—­”

“Has one of our people got this case?” inquired Lloyd.

“Of course.  Didn’t I tell you?”

“I hope we cure it,” said Lloyd, her trunk-tray in her hands.  “I don’t think we have ever lost a case yet when good nursing could pull it through, and in typhoid the whole treatment really is the nursing.”

“Lloyd,” said Miss Douglass decisively, “I would give anything I can think of now to have been on that hip disease case of yours and have brought my patient through as you did.  You should hear what Dr. Street says of you—­and the little girl’s father.  By the way, I had nearly forgotten.  Hattie Campbell—­that’s her name, isn’t it?—­telephoned to know if you had come back from the country yet.  That was yesterday.  I said we expected you to-day, and she told me to say she was coming to see you.”

The next afternoon toward three o’clock Hattie and her father drove to the square in an open carriage, Hattie carrying a great bunch of violets for Lloyd.  The little invalid was well on the way to complete recovery by now.  Sometimes she was allowed to walk a little, but as often as not her maid wheeled her about in an invalid’s chair.  She drove out in the carriage frequently by way of exercise.  She would, no doubt, always limp a little, but in the end it was certain she would be sound and strong.  For Hattie and her father Lloyd had become a sort of tutelary semi-deity.  In what was left of the family she had her place, hardly less revered than even the dead wife.  Campbell himself, who had made a fortune in Bessemer steel, a well-looking, well-groomed gentleman, smooth-shaven and with hair that was none too gray, more than once caught himself standing before Lloyd’s picture that stood on the mantelpiece in Hattie’s room, looking at it vaguely as he clipped the nib from his cigar.

But on this occasion as the carriage stopped in front of the ample pile of the house Hattie called out, “Oh, there she is now,” and Lloyd came down the steps, carrying her nurse’s bag in her hand.

“Are we too late?” began Hattie; “are you going out; are you on a case?  Is that why you’ve got your bag?  We thought you were on a vacation.”

Campbell, yielding to a certain feeling of uneasiness that Lloyd should stand on the curb while he remained seated, got out of the carriage and stood at her side, gravely listening to the talk between the nurse and her one-time patient.  Lloyd was obliged to explain, turning now to Hattie, now to her father.  She told them that she was in something of a hurry.  She had just been specially called to take a very bad case of typhoid fever in a little suburb of the City, called Medford.  It was not her turn to go, but the physicians in charge of the case, as sometimes happened, had asked especially for her.