too, had she only known it, sitting back in the shadow and saying
little, his steady eyes on Sidney's profile.

But this Carlotta did not know. She went on down the Street in a frenzy
of jealous anger.

After that two ideas ran concurrent in Carlotta's mind: one was to get
Sidney out of the way, the other was to make Wilson propose to her. In
her heart she knew that on the first depended the second.

A week later she made the same frantic excursion, but with a different
result. Sidney was not in sight, or Wilson. But standing on the wooden
doorstep of the little house was Le Moyne. The ailanthus trees were
bare at that time, throwing gaunt arms upward to the November sky. The
street-lamp, which in the summer left the doorstep in the shadow, now
shone through the branches and threw into strong relief Le Moyne's tall
figure and set face. Carlotta saw him too late to retreat. But he
did not see her. She went on, startled, her busy brain scheming anew.
Another element had entered into her plotting. It was the first time
she had known that K. lived in the Page house. It gave her a sense of
uncertainty and deadly fear.

She made her first friendly overture of many days to Sidney the
following day. They met in the locker-room in the basement where the
street clothing for the ward patients was kept. Here, rolled in bundles
and ticketed, side by side lay the heterogeneous garments in which
the patients had met accident or illness. Rags and tidiness, filth and
cleanliness, lay almost touching.

Far away on the other side of the white-washed basement, men were
unloading gleaming cans of milk. Floods of sunlight came down the
cellar-way, touching their white coats and turning the cans to silver.
Everywhere was the religion of the hospital, which is order.

Sidney, harking back from recent slights to the staircase conversation
of her night duty, smiled at Carlotta cheerfully.

"A miracle is happening," she said. "Grace Irving is going out to-day.
When one remembers how ill she was and how we thought she could not
live, it's rather a triumph, isn't it?"

"Are those her clothes?"

Sidney examined with some dismay the elaborate negligee garments in her
hand.

"She can't go out in those; I shall have to lend her something." A
little of the light died out of her face. "She's had a hard fight, and
she has won," she said. "But when I think of what she's probably going
back to--"

Carlotta shrugged her shoulders.

"It's all