r man--who hesitates in the middle of a busy London street
is lost: the cart was upon her before she had moved, the shaft struck
her on the shoulder and down she went into the muddy road!

The driver jerked the horse aside, and leapt from his seat, the usual
crowd, which seems to spring instantaneously from the very stones,
collected and surged round, the usual policeman forced his way through,
and Ida was picked up and carried to the pavement.

There was a patch of blood on the side of her head--the dear, small
head which had rested on Stafford's breast so often!--and she was
unconscious.

"'Orse struck 'er with 'is 'oof," said the policeman, sententiously.
"'Ere, boy, call a keb. I'll have your name and address, young man."

A cab was brought, and Ida, still unconscious, was carried to the
London Hospital.

And lay there, in the white, painfully clean, carbolic-smelling ward,
attended by the most skillful doctors in England and by the grave and
silent nurses, who, notwithstanding their lives of stress and toil, had
not lost the capacity for pity and sympathy. Indeed, no one with a
heart in her bosom could stand up unmoved and hear the girl moaning and
crying in a whisper for "Stafford."

Day and night the white lips framed the same name--Stafford,
Stafford!--as if her soul were in the cry.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

When Ida came to she found the sister of the ward and a young nurse
bending over her with placid and smiling faces. Why a hospital nurse
should under any and every circumstance be invariably cheerful is one
of those mysteries worthy to rank with the problem contained in the
fact that an undertaker is nearly always of a merry disposition.

Of course Ida asked the usual questions:

"Where am I?" and "How long have I been here?" and the sister told her
that she was in the Alexandria ward of the London Hospital, and that
she had been there, unconscious, for ten days.

The nurse smiled as if it were the best joke, in a mild way, in the
world, and answered Ida's further questions while she administered beef
tea with an air of pride and satisfaction which made her plain and
homely face seem angelic to Ida.

"You were knocked down by a cart, you know," said Nurse Brown. "You
weren't badly injured, that is, no bones were broken, as is very often
the case--that girl there in the next bed but two had one arm, one leg,
and two ribs broken: mail cart; and that poor woman opposite, got both
arms and a colla