the next room. Dr. Garford, the
great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently
expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town;
but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for
the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the
scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town,
the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of
disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from
alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had
been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the
child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.

Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright
face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet
were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in
imagination what was going on in the other room....

She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always
sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her
armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior
which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility
that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known
to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it
fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and
to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly,
while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?

She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced
exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there,
knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done
within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and
scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace
toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare,
cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of
instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages,
water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to
know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor
pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she
had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping
pangs of cons