e white
hands on the edge of the table, and said quietly:

"_Messieurs et Mesdames_"--

We lit our cigarettes, and she began:

* * * * *

It was the first year after I left home and took up nursing. I had a
room at that time in one of the Friendly Society refuges on the lower
side of Beacon Hill. It was under the auspices of an Episcopal High
Church in the days of Father Hall, and was rather English in tone.
Indeed its matron was an Englishwoman--gentle, round-faced,
lace-capped, and very sympathetic. I was very fond of her. I had, as a
seamstress, a neat little girl named Josephine.

Josephine was a tiny creature, all grey in tone, with mouse-colored
hair. She was a foundling. She had not the least notion who her people
were. Her first recollections were of the orphan asylum where she was
brought up. In her early teens she had been bound out to a
dressmaker, who had been kind to her, and, when her first employer
died, Josephine, who had saved a little money, and longed for
independence, began to go out as a seamstress among the women she had
grown to know in the dressmaking establishment, and went to live at
one of the Christian Association homes for working girls.

Every one knows what those boarding houses are--two or three hundred
girls of all ages, from sixteen up, of all temperaments. All girls
willing to submit to control; girls with their gay days and their
tragic, girls of ambition, and girls with faith in the future, as well
as girls of no luck, and girls with their simple youthful romances.

Every one loved Josephine.

She was by nature a little lady, dainty in her ways, industrious,
unrebellious, always ready to help the other girls about their
clothes, and a model of a confidant. Every one told her their little
troubles, every one confided their little romances. They were sure of
a good listener, who never had any troubles or romances of her own to
confide.

I don't know how old Josephine was at that time. She might have been
twenty-five, looked younger, but was perhaps older. She was so tiny,
and such a mouse of a thing that she seemed a child, but for her
energy, and her capacity for silence.

It was, I fancy, three years after I first knew her that she one
evening confided to a group of her intimate friends, as they sat
together over their sewing, that she was engaged to be married. There
was a great excitement. Little lonely Josephine, so discreet, who had
sy