it."

Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition when she saw Mrs.
Westmore's face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to
him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore
would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while,
even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might
still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how
Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already
telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.

"To the hospital--now? I should like it of all things," she exclaimed,
rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of
course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on
seeing Dillon yesterday--but I begin to think the matron didn't want me
to."

Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting
himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions
about Dillon's family, the ages of his children, and his wife's health.
Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the
general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to
lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view
might grow out of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile
Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of
feeling her near him--of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way
her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the
way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off
into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.

At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the
official "visitors' hour" was not till the afternoon; and beside the
sufferer's bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion
which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as though her lips had
been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was
clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish
tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs.
Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state
of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to
his wife's fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.

Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse--a gapi