He had accepted without scruple the sacrifice of pride she had made to him; but he had known how to appreciate her scientific training, which he found as respectable as that of any clever, young man of their profession.  He praised, in his way, the perfection with which she interpreted his actions and intentions in regard to the patient.  “If there were such nurses as you, Miss Breen, there would be very little need of doctors,” he said, with a sort of interogative fashion of laughing peculiar to him.

“I thought of being a nurse once;” she answered.  “Perhaps I may still be one.  The scientific training won’t be lost.”

“Oh, no?  It’s a pity that more of them have n’t it.  But I suppose they think nursing is rather too humble an ambition.”

“I don’t think it so,” said Grace briefly.

“Then you did n’t care for medical distinction.”

“No.”

He looked at her quizzically, as if this were much droller than if she had cared.  “I don’t understand why you should have gone into it.  You told me, I think, that it was repugnant to you; and it’s hard work for a woman, and very uncertain work for anyone.  You must have had a tremendous desire to benefit your race.”

His characterization of her motive was so distasteful that she made no reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear unhappy.  “How do you find Mrs. Maynard to-day?” she asked.

He looked at her with an instant coldness, as if he did not like her asking, and were hesitating whether to answer.  But he said at last, “She is no better.  She will be worse before she is better.  You see,” he added, “that I haven’t been able to arrest the disorder in its first stage.  We must hope for what can be done now, in the second.”

She had gathered from the half jocose ease with which he had listened to Mrs. Maynard’s account of herself, and to her own report, an encouragement which now fell to the ground “Yes,” she assented, in her despair, “that is the only hope.”

He sat beside the table in the hotel parlor, where they found themselves alone for the moment, and drubbed upon it with an absent look.  “Have you sent for her husband?” he inquired, returning to himself.

“Yes; Mr. Libby telegraphed the evening we saw you.”

“That’s good,” said Dr. Mulbridge, with comfortable approval; and he rose to go away.

Grace impulsively detained him.  “I—­won’t—­ask you whether you consider Mrs. Maynard’s case a serious one, if you object to my doing so.”

“I don’t know that I object,” he said slowly, with a teasing smile, such as one might use with a persistent child whom one chose to baffle in that way.

She disdained to avail herself of the implied permission.  “What I mean—­what I wish to tell you is—­that I feel myself responsible for her sickness, and that if she dies, I shall be guilty of her death.”

“Ah?” said Dr. Mulbridge, with more interest, but the same smile.  “What do you mean?”