broad ledges of the windows, where any other woman
would have had a plant or two, there was no array of geraniums or
verbenas--not even a seedling orange tree or a monthly rose. But in one
of them lay a plaid shawl and a carpet bag, and in the other that
peculiar and nearly obsolete piece of feminine property, a paper
bandbox, tied about with tape.

Packed up for a journey?

Reader, Miss Sampson was _always_ packed up. She was that much-enduring,
all-foregoing creature, a professional nurse.

There would have been no one to feed a cat, or a canary bird, or to
water a rose bush, if she had had one. Her home was no more to her than
his station at the corner of the street is to the handcart man or the
hackney coachman. It was only the place where she might receive orders;
whence she might go forth to the toilsomeness and gloom of one sick room
after another, returning between each sally and the next to her
cheerless post of waiting--keeping her strength for others, and living
no life of her own.

There was nothing in Miss Sampson's outer woman that would give you, at
first glance, an idea of her real energy and peculiar force of
character. She was a tall and slender figure, with no superfluous weight
of flesh; and her long, thin arms seemed to have grown long and wiry
with lifting, and easing, and winding about the poor wrecks of mortality
that had lost their own vigor, and were fain to beg a portion of hers.
Her face was thin and rigid, too--molded to no mere graces of
expression--but with a strong outline, and a habitual compression about
the mouth that told you, when you had once learned somewhat of its
meaning, of the firm will that would go straight forward to its object,
and do, without parade or delay, whatever there might be to be done.
Decision, determination, judgment, and readiness were all in that
habitual look of a face on which little else had been called out for
years. But you would not so have read it at first sight. You would
almost inevitably have called her a "scrawny, sour-looking old maid."

A creaking step was heard upon the stair, and then a knock of decision
at Miss Sampson's door.

"Come in!"

And as she spoke, Miss Sampson took her cup and saucer in her hand. That
was to be kept waiting no longer for whatever visitor it might chance to
be. She was taking her first sip as Dr. Gracier entered.

"Don't move, Miss Sampson; don't let me interrupt."

"I don't mean to! What sends you here?"