ept on the stretch with
the serious charge of pulses and temperatures, with the grave
responsibility of shelves on shelves of medicine bottles, with acquiring
the best modes of bandaging, fomenting, bleeding, stopping the flow of
blood, so that during the little leisure she had she could not turn to a
book for relief; she fell asleep with sheer fatigue more frequently.

Annie was too high-spirited and independent to feel the loneliness of
her position among strangers, whom she soon converted into friendly
acquaintances, if nothing more, as many a girl--as Dora, for
instance--would have done. But, accustomed as Annie had been all her
life to much closer and warmer relations, she clung to the presence of
Rose in London; and it was a proof of how much the elder sister was used
up, when, even on her days and hours for getting out, it was often with
difficulty that she could bring herself to go and see Rose, or to meet
and walk a portion of the way with her on Rose's progress from Mrs.
Jennings's boarding-house to the Misses Stone's school, where she taught
drawing, or to Mr. St. Foy's art classes, where she learned it.

Annie had suffered considerably from what is known as hospital or
infirmary sore throat, because it is understood to be caused by inhaling
the fumes from the carbolic acid used in the wards. Her rich colour had
to Rose's dismay grown poor and pale for a time. She had laboured under
the still more trying and more dangerous infliction, when the senses
morbidly excited become morbidly acute, and she seemed still to smell
the peculiar air of the wards wherever she went. Then Mrs. Hull insisted
on Annie's leaving for a few days, and bundled her off, without the
power of resistance, to a sister of the matron's, who kindly consented,
as her part of the work, to receive and recruit the temporarily overdone
servants of St. Ebbe's Hospital.

In spite of the strength of Annie's nerves, and her power of controlling
them, she sickened once or twice with a deadly sickness at sights and
sounds worse than her most vivid imagination could have conceived
possible. She had to summon all her courage, together with the
conviction that if she did not overcome the weakness speedily, she would
be compelled to own that she had mistaken her calling, in order to
vanquish the insidious foe.

Sometimes, while she was ready to thank God that it was rather the
exception than the rule, she had to witness the lowest moral degradation
in