pened.

"Is she here? Can I see her?"

"She is not in this building, but I will inform her of your arrival. I have
become much interested in her. She is a brilliant, erratic creature, and
has a soul! which cannot safely be predicated of all the sex nowadays.
Where are you going?"

"Back to Uncle Eric. Will you put me in the same hospital with Electra and
Mrs. Campbell?"

"I will put you in a strait-jacket! I promise you that."

Electra was agreeably surprised at the unusual warmth with which Irene
received her some hours later, but little suspected why the lips lingered
in their pressure of hers, or understood the wistful tenderness of the eyes
which dwelt so fondly on her face. The icy wall of reserve had suddenly
melted, as if in the breath of an August noon, and dripped silently down
among things long past. Russell's name was casually mentioned more than
once, and Electra fell asleep that night wholly unconscious that the torn
and crumpled pages of her heart had been thoroughly perused by the woman
from whom she was most anxious to conceal the truth.

Having engaged a suite of rooms near the hospital, a few days sufficed for
preliminary arrangements, and Irene was installed in a ward of the building
to which she had requested Dr. Arnold to appoint her.

Thus, by different, by devious thorny paths, two sorrowing women emerged
upon the broad highway of Duty, and, clasping hands, pressed forward to the
divinely appointed goal--Womanly Usefulness.

Only those who have faithfully ministered in a hospital can fully
appreciate the onerous nature of the burdens thus assumed--can realize the
crushing anxiety, the sleepless apprehension, the ceaseless tension of
brain and nerve, the gnawing, intolerable sickness and aching of heart over
sufferings which no human skill can assuage; and the silent blistering
tears which are shed over corpses of men whose families kneel in far
distant homes, praying God's mercy on dear ones lying at that moment stark
and cold on hospital cots with strangers' hands about the loved limbs.

Day by day, week after week, those tireless women-watchers walked the
painful round from patient to patient, administering food and medicine to
diseased bodies, and words of hope and encouragement to souls, who shrank
not from the glare and roar and carnage of battle, but shivered and cowered
before the daring images which deathless memory called from the peaceful,
happy Past. It was not wonderful that t