and running up and down the cell like a maniac.  I tried to quiet and encourage her, but she paid no more attention than if stone deaf; and when I started to leave her, she seized my arm, and begged me to ask you to come and stay with her.  She thinks if you would sing for her, she could listen, and forget the horrible things that haunt her.  It is positively sickening to see her terror at the thought of death.  Poor, desperate creature.”

“Yet you withheld her message when I might have comforted her?”

“It was a crazy whim.  In hardened cases like hers, death-bed remorse counts for very little.  Her conscience is lashing her; could you quiet that?  Could you bleach out the blood that spots her soul?”

“Yes, by leading her to One who can.”

“Remember, you asked me as a special favor to keep you as far apart as possible from all of her class.”

“At that time, overwhelmed by the misery of my own fate, I was pitiless to the sufferings of others.  The rod that smote me was very cruel then; but by degrees it seems to bud like Aaron’s with precious promise, that may expand into the immortal flowers of souls redeemed.  I dwelt too long in the seat of the Pharisees; I shall live closer to God, walking humbly among the Publicans.  Will you show me the way to the woman who wishes to see me?”

“Not yet.  There are some instructions that must be carefully weighed before I can install you as nurse, in that dismal mire of moral and physical corruption.  Singleton, send the hospital steward to me.”

There are spectacles which brand themselves so ineffaceably upon memory, that time has no power to impair their vividness; and of such were some of the scenes witnessed by the new nurse.

Sitting on the side of her cot, from which the gray blanket had been dragged and folded half across her shoulders, where one hand held it, while the other clutched savagely at her throat; with her bare delicate feet beating a tattoo on the white sanded floor, and her thin nostrils dilated in the battle for breath, Iva Le Bougeois moaned in abject terror.  The coarse, unbleached “domestic” night-gown that fell to her ankles was streaked across the bosom with some dark brown fluid; and similar marks stained the pillow where her restless head had tossed.  The hot eyes and parched red lips seemed to have drained all the tainted blood from her olive cheeks, save where, just beneath the lower lids, ominous terra-cotta rings had been painted and glazed by the disease.

As Beryl pushed open the iron door, and held up the lantern, that its brightness might stream into the cell, where even at five o’clock in the afternoon of a rainy day darkness reigned, the rays flashed back from the glowing eyes chatoyant as a cougar’s.

“Your message was not delivered until to-day, and I lost no time in coming.”

The small head, where short, straight, blue-black locks, rumpled and disordered, were piled elfishly around the low brow, was thrown up with the swift movement of some startled furry animal, alert even in the throes of death.