The young woman went without haste, to show that a night assistant may do

such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at

the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was

filling out records.

"Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like

Carlotta Harrison!" she complained. "I've got to go to the trunk-room for

her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!"

As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the

fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room,

Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand. The night

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assistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.

"Why don't you let me do it?" she asked irritably.

Carlotta did not reply at once. The candle was in her hand, and she was

staring at the letter.

"Because I want to do it myself," she said at last, and thrust the envelope

into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with

yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening,

destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid

odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black

ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta speak again.

Then:-"If every fool of a woman who wrote a letter burnt it, there would be less

trouble in the world," she said, and lay back among her pillows.

The assistant said nothing. She was sleepy and irritated, and she had

crushed her best cap by letting the lid of Carlotta's trunk fall on her.

She went out of the room with disapproval in every line of her back.

"She burned it," she informed the night nurse at her desk. "A letter to a

man--one of her suitors, I suppose. The name was K. Le Moyne."

The deepening and broadening of Sidney's character had been very noticeable

in the last few months. She had gained in decision without becoming hard;

had learned to see things as they are, not through the rose mist of early

girlhood; and, far from being daunted, had developed a philosophy that had

for its basis God in His heaven and all well with the world.

But her new theory of acceptance did not comprehend everything. She was in

a state of wild revolt, for instance, as to Johnny Rosenfeld, and more

remotely but not less deeply concerned over Grace Irving. Soon she was to

learn of Tillie's predicament, and to take up the cudgels valiantly for

her.




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