ll me through some way.... But I wish Scip hadn't told just
now. I can't _help_ being sorry. It wasn't that I wanted to cheat,
but"--he choked--"_the sick folks used to like me_. Now, do you think
I'd ought to go on nursing, Doctor? Do you think I'd ought to stop?"

"You are already an hour late," replied the woman of science, in her
usual business-like voice. "Your substitute will be sleepy and
restless; that affects the patient. Go back to your work as fast as
you can. Ask me no more foolish questions."

She drew her veil; there was unprofessional moisture on her long,
feminine lashes. She held out her hearty hand-grasp to him, touched
the tackey, and galloped away.

"She is a good woman," said Zerviah, half aloud, looking down at his
cold fingers. "She touched me, and she knew! Lord, I should like to
have you bless her!"

He looked after her. She sat her horse finely; her gray veil drifted
in the hot wind. His sensitive color came. He watched her as if he had
known that he should never see her again on earth.

A ruined character may be as callous as a paralyzed limb. A ruined and
repentant one is in itself an independent system of sensitive and
tortured nerves.

Zerviah Hope returned to his work, shrinking under the foreknowledge
of his fate. He felt as if he knew what kind of people would remind
him that they had become acquainted with his history, and what ways
they would select to do it.

He was not taken by surprise when men who had lifted their hats to the
popular nurse last week, passed him on the street to-day with a cold
nod or curious stare. When women who had reverenced the self-sacrifice
and gentleness of his life as only women do or can reverence the
quality of tenderness in a man, shrank from him as if he were
something infectious, like the plague,--he knew it was just, though he
felt it hard.

His patients heard of what had happened, sometimes, and indicated a
feeling of recoil. That was the worst. One said:

"I am sorry to hear you are not the man we thought you," and died in
his arms that night.

Zerviah remembered that these things must be. He reasoned with
himself. He went into his attic, and prayed it all over. He said:

"Lord, I can't expect to be treated as if I'd never been in prison.
I'm sorry I mind it so. Perhaps I'd ought not to. I'll try not to care
too much."

More than once he was sure of being followed again, suspiciously or
curiously. It occurred to him at last that this