nce
that that was the hardest job he ever tackled. He said he could write
like his heroes easy enough, but not like himself. But he was always
joshing, that man.

"Why, Miss Jessop," he used to say to me, "if I could write like
myself, I'd have won the Nobel prize any time this last ten years!"

But he wrote awfully well, I always thought. Hardly a patient I had
that year, but if I offered to read, they'd say:

"Oh, well, what's the last C----r's?" and when I got to the parts I'd
taken for him (I learned stenography before I took up nursing) it used
to give me a queer sort of feeling, really!

It was Dr. Stanchon that got me the case. He 'phoned me to drop in at
the office, and a patient of mine took me around in her car: I'd been
shopping with her all the morning. She had just invited me to go out
to her country place for a few days, and I was quite pleased with the
idea, for I was a little tired: I was just off a hard pneumonia case
that had been pretty sad in lots of ways, and I felt a little blue.
It's an awfully funny thing, but nurses aren't supposed to have any
feelings: when that poor girl died, I felt as bad as if it had been my
own sister, almost. She was lovely.

But when the doctor asked if I was free, of course I had to say yes,
though my suit-case was all packed for the country.

"That's good," he said, "for I specially want you. It's nothing to do,
really, and you'll enjoy it, you're such a motor-fiend. There's a
family I'm looking after wants a nurse to go along on a tour through
the country--New England, I believe. They've got a big, dressy car,
and they expect to be gone anywhere from two weeks to a month, if the
weather's reasonably good."

"What do they want of a nurse?" I said.

"Oh, they just want one along, in case of anything happening," he said.
"They can afford it, so why shouldn't they have it?"

Well, that sounded all right, and yet I got the idea that it wasn't the
real reason, somehow. I don't know why. Those things are queer.

Of course, there was no reason why it shouldn't be so: I spent a month
on a private yacht, one summer, just to be there in case of sickness,
and nobody wanted me all the time we were gone, for a minute. As a
matter of fact, the lady's maid took care of me the first three days
out!

But I never happened to be asked on a motor-trip in that way, and it
seemed a little different. For of course you could pick up a nurse
almost anywhere, if you w