'Oh, no, ma'am, it's all a mistake me being here, and these
clo'es mustn't belong to a workin'-girl like me. I might go to school
some day,' I says, 'and be a writer sort of, mebbe; but I ain't a lady,
ma'am, Miss Heth, no, nor never will be.' And Miss Heth she takes my
face between her hands--yes, sir, she did, Mr. V.V., right there before
'em all--and she says, kind of surprised, 'Why, Co-rinne, I thought
Doctor he told you long ago,' she says. 'You been a lady all the
time ...' And then ... and then I woke up!... Wasn't that funny?" said
Kern. And her face indicated that she might have told more, if she had
had a mind to....

She lay staring, with parted lips and that same remote half-smile, as of
one not yet fully returned from fairy wanderings in far lands. She did
not seem to expect her inquiry to bring forth any response from the man
sitting in the shadows, and it didn't, so far as words went. Mr. V.V.'s
fingers had closed over her exposed wrist; presently he put the bony
little arm back under the cover, rose, and went over silently to the
other gas-jet where the little fixture was. The nurse, who had risen on
an elbow at the first sound of voices, had lain down again at the young
man's signal. She did not stir now, though perhaps she was not asleep.

Mr. V.V. returned to the bed with a cup in his hand. Kern was lying
exactly as he had left her--"the wonder was not quite yet gone from that
still look of hers."

"Drink this, Kernie...."

She drank incuriously, with his supporting hand upon her back; was
gently lowered upon her pillow again; and then she turned upon her side,
wide-eyed still, but silent.

"Now, go to sleep. I'll sit here by you...."

He noted the fact of beef-tea at twelve-thirty upon the chart, and sat
again in the shadows. Soon Kern's eyelids drooped, and in time she
fell asleep.

But the doctor sat on in the dim room, long after his charity sick had
slipped back again to her happy dreams. And as he sat, there waxed a
flame in him, and he pledged himself that henceforward there should be
no pausing, neither compassion nor compunction. What mattered the
troubles of individuals? What mattered himself, or that Duty to-night
seemed visaged like an Iron Maid? Here, indeed, there beckoned him the
great good task. The day of the rocky plain and the prophet in a
loincloth was gone; but was there less might in the printed word and the
penny newspaper? Spare this child, Lord, and the wrongs done u