nervously. "What do you mean?"

"Answer me," the nurse insisted. "Have you heard of the Refuges? Have
you heard of the Women?"

"Yes."

"Move your chair a little further away from me." She paused. Her voice,
without losing its steadiness, fell to its lowest tones. "_I_ was once
of those women," she said, quietly.

Grace sprang to her feet with a faint cry. She stood petrified--
incapable of uttering a word.

"_I_ have been in a Refuge," pursued the sweet, sad voice of the other
woman. "_I_ have been in a Prison. Do you still wish to be my friend? Do
you still insist on sitting close by me and taking my hand?" She waited
for a reply, and no reply came. "You see you were wrong," she went on,
gently, "when you called me cruel--and I was right when I told you I was
kind."

At that appeal Grace composed herself, and spoke. "I don't wish to
offend you--" she began, confusedly.

Mercy Merrick stopped her there.

"You don't offend me," she said, without the faintest note of
displeasure in her tone. "I am accustomed to stand in the pillory of
my own past life. I sometimes ask myself if it was all my fault. I
sometimes wonder if Society had no duties toward me when I was a child
selling matches in the street--when I was a hard-working girl fainting
at my needle for want of food." Her voice faltered a little for the
first time as it pronounced those words; she waited a moment, and
recovered herself. "It's too late to dwell on these things now," she
said, resignedly. "Society can subscribe to reclaim me; but Society
can't take me back. You see me here in a place of trust--patiently,
humbly, doing all the good I can. It doesn't matter! Here, or elsewhere,
what I _am_ can never alter what I _was_. For three years past all that
a sincerely penitent woman can do I have done. It doesn't matter! Once
let my past story be known, and the shadow of it covers me; the kindest
people shrink."

She waited again. Would a word of sympathy come to comfort her from the
other woman's lips? No! Miss Roseberry was shocked; Miss Roseberry was
confused. "I am very sorry for you," was all that Miss Roseberry could
say.

"Everybody is sorry for me," answered the nurse, as patiently as ever;
"everybody is kind to me. But the lost place is not to be regained. I
can't get back! I can't get back?" she cried, with a passionate outburst
of despair--checked instantly the moment it had escaped her. "Shall I
tell you what my experience has been?" she