in was your
friend--your only friend in London, so far as they know. Surely that is
an extenuating circumstance so plausible----"

"But I cannot----"

"I know it is bitter to explain--to apologize--and if I can do it for
you----"

"I will not allow it!" she said. Her lips were set, and her breath was
coming through them in gusts.

"It is a pity to allow the hospitals to be closed against you. Nursing is
a good profession, Glory--even a fashionable one. It is true womanly
work, and----"

"That was what he said."

"Who? John Storm? He was right. Indeed, he was an entirely honourable and
upright man, and----"

"But _you_ always seemed to say there were other things more worthy of a
girl, and if she had a mind to---- But no matter. We needn't talk about
the hospitals any longer. I am not fit for them and shall never go back
to them, whatever happens."

He looked down at her. She was biting her lips, and the tears were
gathering in her eyes.

"Well, well, never mind, dear," he said, and he patted her hand again.

The moon had begun to wane, and out of the dark shadows they walked in
they could see the lines of houses lit up all around.

"Look," she said, with a feeble laugh, "in all this great busy London is
there nothing else I'm fit for?"

"You are fit for anything in the world, my dear," he answered.

Her nerves were throbbing harder than ever. "Perhaps he doesn't
remember," she thought. Should she tell him what he said so often about
her talents, and how much she might be able to make of them?

"Is there nothing a girl can do except go down on her knees to a woman?"

He laughed and talked some nonsense about the kneeling. "Poor little
woman, she doesn't know what she is doing," he thought.

"I shouldn't mind what people thought of me," she said, "not even my own
people, who have been brought up with such narrow ideas, you know. They
might think what they liked, if I felt I was in the right place at
last--the right place for me, I mean."

Her nervous fingers were involuntarily clutching at his coat sleeve.
"Now, any other man----" he thought.

She began to cry. "He _won't_ remember," she told herself. "It was only
his way of being agreeable when he praised me and predicted such
wonderful things. And now his good breeding will not allow him to tell me
there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of girls in London as
likely to----"

"Come, you mustn't cry, Glory. It's not so bad as that."

Sh