apartment
in the city, and that I may live with them until I get into the
hospital. This makes me very happy, and I hope that you will be pleased,
too.

I know that everything is going to be very different there in Boston,
and that you are so busy that I cannot see you very often, and, besides,
when I do get into the hospital I must be careful to remember that you
are a very great doctor and I am only one of many probationers (Miss
Merriman told me the word). But, although we cannot be chums like we
have been, you must never forget that I am always

Your loving foster-sister,
Smiles.

CHAPTER XXIV

NEW SCENES, NEW FRIENDS

So another leaf was turned in the Book of Fate, and Smiles' life
underwent another metamorphosis as complete as the one fifteen years
previous.

There was a sudden severance of all old ties, save that of memory, an
abrupt entrance into a new existence, so utterly different from the one
that she had known that it could scarcely have seemed stranger to her if
she had actually been translated into another sphere.

Yet that same Fate, which had tried her heart in its crucible fires, and
found its gold as unalloyed as her smile, now smiled, in turn, and Rose
was deeply appreciative of that fact. She knew that in Gertrude Merriman
she had found a friend who was a blessed comforter for her in her days
of trial; in truth, the nurse was destined to be more than that, a wise
counsellor as well. Herself a girl of breeding, a college graduate, and
a product of the same mill through which the mountain child had set her
heart and fixed her mind upon going, she would be able to smooth many a
rough spot from that path which Donald had pictured in his allegory,
draw the thorns from many a bramble.

For the first time Rose parted from the friends whom she had known
practically all her life, and from the rugged, picturesque mountain
which had been home to her, and turned her face toward a new life. Like
a child venturing into the fairyland of dreams, she journeyed with her
companion through the teeming cities of the East, Miss Merriman so
arranging it that they should spend a day in each, for--with wisdom born
of experience--she realized that such travel was in itself a broadening
education, and that, moreover, in the new wonders and new delights which
each hour held, Smiles' grief would find its best assuageme