hing at all hard or defiant
about her sweet face. She was a dark-eyed girl, and looked as if she
might be any age between seventeen and twenty. There was a likeness
between her and her mother quite sufficient to show their relationship;
both faces were softly curved, both pairs of eyes were dark, and the
mother must have been even prettier in her youth than the daughter was
now.

"As I say," continued Mrs. Staunton, "it fills me with terror to think
of doing without you."

"Try not to think of it, mother. I am not going yet, I only want to go
very much indeed. I am going to talk to father about it. I want to have
the thing arranged while Dorothy is here."

Here Effie went suddenly on her knees by the sofa and threw one young
arm protectingly round her mother.

"You do not know what it means to me," she said. "When Dorothy talks of
the full life, the keen interest, the battle, the thrill of living, I
feel that I must go into it--I must."

While Effie was speaking, Mrs. Staunton looked fixedly at her. There are
moments which all mothers know, when they put themselves completely out
of sight, when they blot themselves out, as it were. This time had come
to Mrs. Staunton now.

After a pause, she said, and her words came out even without a sigh:

"The question, after all, is this, Effie: What will your father say?"

"When he thinks it out carefully he will be pleased," replied Effie. "He
must be interested in the profession I want to take up. How often--oh,
how often, mother--has he groaned and sighed at the bad nursing which
his patients get! You know you have always said, and he has said the
same, that I am a born nurse. Won't he be proud and pleased when I come
home and tell him all about the new ways in which things are done in
London hospitals? You know there are six of us, and Agnes and Katie are
growing up, and can take my place at home presently. Of course I know
that father is quite the cleverest doctor in Whittington, but nobody
gets ill here, and it is quite impossible to go on clothing and feeding
six of us with no means at all. I do not think I am vain, mother, and I
do not really care very much about dress, but mine is shabby, is it not?
I think I should look pretty--as pretty as you must have looked long
ago--if I were better dressed."

"No dress can change your face," said Mrs. Staunton, with sudden
passion. "You have the sweetest and dearest face in the world to me.
When you go away the sunshine w