* * *

That night, after the physicians had gone about their business,
Zerviah Hope wandered, a little forlornly, through the wretched town.
Scip, the negro boatman, found him a corner to spend the night. It was
a passable place, but Hope could not sleep; he had already seen too
much. His soul was parched with the thirst of sympathy. He walked his
hot attic till the dawn came. As it grew brighter he grew calmer; and,
when the unkindly sun burst burning upon the land, he knelt by his
window and looked over the doomed town, and watched the dead-carts
slinking away toward the everglades in the splendid color of the sky
and air, and thought his own thoughts in his own way about this which
he had come to do. We should not suppose that they were remarkable
thoughts; he had not the look of a remarkable man. Yet, as he knelt
there,--a sleepless, haggard figure blotted against the sunrise,
with folded hands and moving lips,--an artist, with a high type of
imagination and capable of spiritual discernment, would have found in
him a design for a lofty subject, to which perhaps he would have given
the name of "Consecration" rather than of "Renunciation," or of
"Exultance" rather than of "Dread."

A common observer would have simply said: "I should not have taken him
for a praying man."

He was still upon his knees when Dr. Dare's order came, "Nurse wanted
for a bad case!" and he went from his prayer to his first patient. The
day was already deep, and a reflection, not of the sunrise, moved with
him as light moves.

Doctor Dare, in her gray dress, herself a little pale, met him with
keen eyes. She said:

"It is a _very_ bad case. An old man--much neglected. No one will go.
Are you willing?"

The nurse answered:

"I am glad."

She watched him as he walked away--a plain, clean, common man, with
unheroic carriage. The physician's fine eyes fired.

To Doctor Frank, who had happened in, she said:

"He will do the work of ten."

"His strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure,"

quoted the young man, laughing lightly. "I don't know that I should
have thought it, in this case. You've taken a fancy to the fellow."

"I always respect an unmixed motive when I see it," she replied,
shortly. "But I've been in practice too long to take sudden fancies.
There is no profession like ours, Doctor, for putting the sympathies
under double picket guard."

She stiffened a little in her manner.