“Keep off the grass,” cried the Youngster.  “I brought back a car full of books.”  The hint was taken, and we talked of books until the coffee came out.

As usual, the Trained Nurse sat behind the pot, and when we were all served, she pushed the tray back, folded her strong capable white hands on the edge of the table, and said quietly: 

“Messieurs et Mesdames”—­

We lit our cigarettes, and she began: 

* * * * *

It was the first year after I left home and took up nursing.  I had a room at that time in one of the Friendly Society refuges on the lower side of Beacon Hill.  It was under the auspices of an Episcopal High Church in the days of Father Hall, and was rather English in tone.  Indeed its matron was an Englishwoman—­gentle, round-faced, lace-capped, and very sympathetic.  I was very fond of her.  I had, as a seamstress, a neat little girl named Josephine.

Josephine was a tiny creature, all grey in tone, with mouse-colored hair.  She was a foundling.  She had not the least notion who her people were.  Her first recollections were of the orphan asylum where she was brought up.  In her early teens she had been bound out to a dressmaker, who had been kind to her, and, when her first employer died, Josephine, who had saved a little money, and longed for independence, began to go out as a seamstress among the women she had grown to know in the dressmaking establishment, and went to live at one of the Christian Association homes for working girls.

Every one knows what those boarding houses are—­two or three hundred girls of all ages, from sixteen up, of all temperaments.  All girls willing to submit to control; girls with their gay days and their tragic, girls of ambition, and girls with faith in the future, as well as girls of no luck, and girls with their simple youthful romances.

Every one loved Josephine.

She was by nature a little lady, dainty in her ways, industrious, unrebellious, always ready to help the other girls about their clothes, and a model of a confidant.  Every one told her their little troubles, every one confided their little romances.  They were sure of a good listener, who never had any troubles or romances of her own to confide.

I don’t know how old Josephine was at that time.  She might have been twenty-five, looked younger, but was perhaps older.  She was so tiny, and such a mouse of a thing that she seemed a child, but for her energy, and her capacity for silence.

It was, I fancy, three years after I first knew her that she one evening confided to a group of her intimate friends, as they sat together over their sewing, that she was engaged to be married.  There was a great excitement.  Little lonely Josephine, so discreet, who had sympathized with the romances of so many of her comrades, had a romance of her own.  Such a hugging and kissing as went on, you never saw, unless you have seen a crowd of such girls together.  Every one was full of questions, and there were almost as many tears shed as questions asked.