t her mental condition and experiences: this is
because I have endeavored to present this part of her life, exactly as
she lived it, and as she would tell it herself. That there were many
hours of acute suffering; many moments when her courage wellnigh failed;
when she was almost ready to go back to her home, fling herself at her
husband's feet, and cry, "Let me be but as a servant in thy house,"--it
is not needful to say.

Hearts answer to hearts, and no heart could fail to know that a woman in
Hetty's position must suffer keenly and constantly. But this story would
do great injustice to her, and would be essentially false, if it spoke
often of, or dwelt at any length upon the sufferings which Hetty herself
never mentioned, and put always away from her with an unflinching
resolution. Year after year, the routine of her days went on as we
have described; unchanged except that she grew more and more into the
affections of the villagers among whom she came and went, and of the
hundreds of ill and suffering men and women whom she nursed. She was no
nearer becoming a Roman Catholic than she had been when she sat in the
Welbury meeting-house: even Father Antoine had given over hoping for her
conversion; but her position in St. Mary's was like the position of a
Lady Abbess in a religious community; her authority, which rarely took
on an authoritative shape, was great; and her influence was greater than
her authority. In Dr. Macgowan's House of Cure, she was second only to
the doctor himself; and, if the truth were told, it might have been said
she was second to none.

Patients went away from St. Mary's every year who stoutly ascribed
their cure to her, and not to the waters nor to the physicians. Her
straightforward, kindly, common sense was a powerful tonic, morally and
physically, to all invalids whom she nursed. She had no tolerance for
any weakness which could be conquered. She had infinite tenderness for
all weakness which was inevitable; and her discriminations between the
two were always just. "I'd trust more to Mrs. Smailli's diagnosis of any
case than I would to my own," said Dr. Macgowan to his fellow-physicians
more than once. And, when they scoffed at the idea, he replied: "I
do not mean in the technicalities of specific disease, of course. The
recognition of those is a matter of specific training; but, in all those
respects, a physician's diagnosis may be faultless; and yet he be much
mistaken in regard to the t