k or smooth down the hard, straight lines which she
had laid down for her own and everyone else's guidance. She disapproved
of Joan, but obedience to the doctor's orders was a religion to her;
even where she disapproved she always implicitly carried them out.

Next day, therefore, she stopped for quite a long time at Joan's bed,
talking in her toneless, high voice. Had Joan any people who could be
written to, what was her home address, would they not be worried at
hearing nothing from her?

Joan could only shake her head to all the questions. Very vaguely and in
detached fragments she was beginning to remember the time that had
preceded her accident. The memory of Aunt Janet's face and Uncle John's
parting words was like an open wound, it bled at every touch and she
shrank from Nurse Taylor's pointed questions. She remembered how she had
sat on the top of the bus with the black weight of misery on her heart
and of how the tears had come. She had been looking for rooms; that
recollection followed hard on the heels of the other.

When she was well enough to get about she would have to start looking
for rooms again, for she had quite definitely made up her mind not to be
a burden to Miss Abercrombie. It was her own fight; when she had
gathered her strength about her, she would fight it out alone and make a
success of it. Half wistfully she looked into the future and dreamt
about the baby that was coming into her life. She would have to learn to
live down this feeling of shame that burnt at her heart as she thought
of him. He would be all hers, a small life to make of it what she
pleased. Well, she would have to see that she made it fine and gay and
brave. Shame should not enter into their lives, not if she fought hard
enough.

Nurse Taylor described her to the junior afterwards as a most stubborn
and hardened type of girl.

"The poor thing has hardly got her wits about her yet," the other
answered; "she is very little trouble in the wards, we have had worse."

"Well, the doctor can question her himself next time," Nurse Taylor
snorted. "I am not here to be snubbed by her sort."

She did not, however, let the matter drop entirely. At the end of her
third week Joan was promoted to an armchair in the verandah and there
one afternoon, after the teas had been handed round, Nurse Taylor
brought her a visitor. A tall, sad-faced, elderly woman, who walked
with a curiously deprecating movement, seeming to apologize for every