r on the right
hand; when all sorts of scientific people, religious people, students
of poetry, people with exquisite emotions, will go on the left and be
damned everlastingly. Miriam was at once sent to bed, and it was
arranged that she should take charge during the following night.
Afterwards the night duty was to fall equally between them. She was so
shut up in herself that she did not recognise the full value of Mrs.
Joll's self-sacrifice, but she did manage to express her thanks, and
ask how Mrs. Joll could leave the business.

"That's nothing to you, Miss; my gal Maud has a head on her shoulders,
and can keep an eye on the place downstairs. Besides, I've allus found
that at a pinch things will bear a lot of squeezing. I remember when
my good man were laid up with the low fever for six weeks, and I had a
baby a month old, I thought to myself as I should be beaten; but Lord,
I was young then, and didn't know how much squeezing things will take,
and I just squeezed through somehow."

"He ain't very strong, is he?" continued Mrs. Joll. "I don't mean in
his constitution, but here," and she tapped her head. "Likes a drop or
two now and then?"

Miriam was silent.

"Ah! well, as I said about Joll's brother when I was a-nussing of
him--he was rather a bad lot--it's nothing to me when people are ill
what they are. Besides; there ain't so much difference 'twixt any of
us."

The night came. Miriam rose and went down to her brother's room. She
tried to read, but she could not, and her thoughts were incessantly
occupied with her own troubles. Andrew lay stretched before her--he
might be dying for aught she knew; and yet the prospect of his death
disturbed her only so far as it interfered with herself. Montgomery
was for ever in her mind. What was he that he should set the soul of
this girl alight! He was nothing, but she was something, and he had by
some curious and altogether unaccountable quality managed to wake her
slumbering forces.

She was in love with him, but it was not desire alone which had tired
her, and made her pace up and down Andrew's sick chamber. Thousands of
men with the blackest hair, the most piercing eyes, might have passed
before her, and she would have remained unmoved. Neither was it love
as some select souls understand it. She did not know what it was which
stirred her; she was hungry, mad, she could not tell why. Nobody could
have predicted beforehand that Montgomery was the ma