d,
drew a long, slow breath, then gulped and swallowed it. After that
she lay back with her mouth open, looking like a corpse. Hilda pressed
another spoonful of the soft jelly upon her; but the girl waved it away
with one trembling hand. "Let me die," she cried. "Let me die! I feel
dead already."

Hilda held her face close. "Isabel," she whispered--and I recognised
in her tone the vast moral difference between "Isabel" and "Number
Fourteen,"--"Is-a-bel, you must take it. For Arthur's sake, I say, you
MUST take it."

The girl's hand quivered as it lay on the white coverlet. "For Arthur's
sake!" she murmured, lifting her eyelids dreamily. "For Arthur's sake!
Yes, nurse, dear!"

"Call me Hilda, please! Hilda!"

The girl's face lighted up again. "Yes, Hilda, dear," she answered, in
an unearthly voice, like one raised from the dead. "I will call you what
you will. Angel of light, you have been so good to me."

She opened her lips with an effort and slowly swallowed another
spoonful. Then she fell back, exhausted. But her pulse improved within
twenty minutes. I mentioned the matter, with enthusiasm, to Sebastian
later. "It is very nice in its way," he answered; "but... it is not
nursing."

I thought to myself that that was just what it WAS; but I did not say
so. Sebastian was a man who thought meanly of women. "A doctor, like a
priest," he used to declare, "should keep himself unmarried. His bride
is medicine." And he disliked to see what he called PHILANDERING going
on in his hospital. It may have been on that account that I avoided
speaking much of Hilda Wade thenceforth before him.

He looked in casually next day to see the patient. "She will die,"
he said, with perfect assurance, as we passed down the ward together.
"Operation has taken too much out of her."

"Still, she has great recuperative powers," Hilda answered. "They
all have in her family, Professor. You may, perhaps, remember Joseph
Huntley, who occupied Number Sixty-seven in the Accident Ward, some nine
months since--compound fracture of the arm--a dark, nervous engineer's
assistant--very hard to restrain--well, HE was her brother; he caught
typhoid fever in the hospital, and you commented at the time on his
strange vitality. Then there was her cousin, again, Ellen Stubbs. We had
HER for stubborn chronic laryngitis--a very bad case--anyone else would
have died--yielded at once to your treatment; and made, I recollect, a
splendid convalescence."

"Wh