Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O’Donnell to restore Captain Philip was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her former theories and feelings.  Theoretically she despised the soldier’s work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed.  She regarded him and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm.  The soldier personally, she was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence:  a sort of schoolboy when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not a member of our broader world.  Without dismissing any of these views she found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the country.  If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was one whom it would be grievous to lose.  He had fallen for the country; and there was a moving story of how he had fallen.  She inclined to think more highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier war where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered.  And he seemed to estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels.  A conception of the possibility of a man’s being both a soldier and morally a hero edged its way into her understanding.  It stood edgeways within, desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.

The cares of nursing were Jane’s almost undividedly, except for the aid she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth.  Mrs. Adister O’Donnell was a nurse in name only.  ’She’ll be seen by Philip like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker’s wraith,’ Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw’s model farm Woodside on the hills.  ‘Barring the dress,’ as he added, some such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent invalid.  Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him.  Mrs. Lackstraw was a very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her intuition of John’s wish to have her presiding at table for the entertainment of his numerous guests; she confessed that she supervised the art of nursing better than she practised it, and supervision can be done at a distance if the subordinate is properly attentive to the rules we lay down, as Jane appeared to be.  So Jane was left to him.  She loved the country; Springtide in the country set her singing; her walk to her patient at Lappett’s farm and homeward was an aethereal rapture for a heart rocking easy in fulness.  There was nothing to trouble it, no hint of wild winds and heavy seas, not even the familiar insinuation from the vigilant