tificates. Her confident reference to Father
Antoine was also enough to allay any immediate uneasiness, and, "for the
rest, time will show," thought the doctor; and, without any farther
delay, he engaged Hetty as one of the day nurses in his establishment.
In after years Dr. Macgowan often looked back to this morning, and
thought, with the sort of shudder with which one looks back on a danger
barely escaped:

"Good God! what if I had let that woman go?"

All Hetty's native traits especially adapted her to the profession of
nursing; and her superb physical health was of itself a blessing to
every sick man or sick woman with whom she came in contact. Before she
had been in Dr. Macgowan's house one week, all the patients had learned
to listen in the morning for her step and her voice: they all wanted
her, and begged to be put under her charge.

"Really, Mrs. Smailli, I shall have to cut you up into parcels," said
the doctor one day: "there is not enough of you to go round. You have a
marvellous knack at making sick people like you. Did you really never
nurse before?"

"Not with my hands and feet," replied Hetty, "but I think I have always
been a nurse at heart. I have always been so well that to be sick seems
to me the most dreadful thing in the world. I believe it is the only
trouble I couldn't bear."

"You do not look as if you had ever had any very hard trouble of any
kind," said the doctor in a light tone, but watching keenly the effect
of his words.

Dr. Macgowan was beginning to be tormented by a great desire to know
more in regard to his new nurse. Father Antoine's guarded replies to all
his inquiries about her had only stimulated his curiosity.

"She is a good woman. You may trust her with all your house," Father
Antoine had said; and had told the doctor that he had known both her and
her father twenty years ago. More than this he would not say, farther
than to express the opinion that she would live and die in St. Mary's,
and devote herself to her work so long as she lived.

"She has for it a grand vocation, as we say."

Father Antoine exclaimed, "A grand vocation! Ah! if we but had her in
our convent!"

"You'll never get her there as long as I'm alive, Father Antoine!" Dr.
Macgowan had replied. "You may count upon that."

When Dr. Macgowan said to Hetty:

"You do not look as if you had ever had any very hard trouble of any
kind," Hetty looked in his face eagerly, and answered:

"Do I not, really?