xed to its
utmost to fill her round of daily duties. Aunt Maria scolded and
insisted on a vacation, and finally in high dudgeon betook herself to
Europe for the summer. The few friends with whom Hazel kept up any
intercourse hurried away to mountains or sea, and the summer settled
down to business.

And now in the hot, hot nights when she lay upon her small bed, too
weary almost to sleep, she would fancy she heard again that voice as he
spoke in the church, or longer ago in the desert; and sometimes she
could think she felt the breeze of the desert night upon her hot
forehead.

The head nurse and the house doctor decided Radcliffe needed a change
and suggested a few days at the shore with a convalescing patient, but
Hazel's heart turned from the thought, and she insisted upon sticking to
her post. She clung to the thought that she could at least be faithful.
It was what he would do, and in so much she would be like him, and
worthy of his love.

It was the last thought in her mind before she fainted on the broad
marble staircase with a tiny baby in her arms, and fell to the bottom.
The baby was uninjured, but it took a long time to bring the nurse back
to consciousness, and still longer to put heart into her again.

"She isn't fit for the work!" she heard the biting tongue of the head
nurse declare. "She's too frail and pretty and--emotional. She feels
everybody's troubles. Now I never let a case worry me in the least!" And
the house doctor eyed her knowingly and said in his heart:

"Any one would know that."

But Hazel, listening, was more disheartened than ever. Then here, too,
she was failing and was adjudged unworthy!

The next morning there came a brief, blunt note from Amelia Ellen: "Dear
Mis Raclift Ef yore a trainurse why don't yo cum an' take car o' my Mis
Brownleigh She aint long fer heer an she's wearyin to see yo She as
gotta hev one, a trainurse I mean Yors respectfooly Amelia Ellen Stout."

After an interview with the house doctor and another with her old family
physician, Hazel packed up her uniforms and departed for New Hampshire.

It was the evening of her arrival, after the gentle invalid had been
prepared for sleep and left in the quiet and dark, that Amelia Ellen
told the story:

"She ain't ben the same since John went back. Seems like she sort o'
sensed thet he wouldn't come again while she was livin'. She tole me the
next day a lot of things she wanted done after she was gone, and she's