“I do not ask you to turn back,” he said. “You have devoted yourself to the sick and suffering. The duties can be as well performed where you will be safe, and treated with respect.”
She looked at him doubtingly.
“Let me counsel you,” he said. “Come.”
“Where?” she asked, and he held out his hand. “You can trust me,” he said; and he led her to his carriage, and then through the ward of the hospital where he reigned supreme.
It was a few days after a terrible accident at one of the hives of industry, and among other sufferers, some ten or a dozen poor work-girls lay, burned, maimed, and in agony, longingly gazing at the door to see the face of the grey-haired man on whose words they hung for life and strength.
That day he came accompanied by his pale, sweet-faced young friend, in whose beautiful eyes the tears gathered as she went round with him from bed to bed, appalled by the amount of bodily and mental suffering gathered in that one narrow space.
“Well?” he said, a couple of hours later. “Is it too dreadful, or will you help me here?”
“Can I?” she said simply. “I am so ignorant and young.”
“You possess that,” he said gravely, “which no education can impart. Your presence here will be sunshine through the clouds. I should shrink from asking you to come among these horrors, but you have, for some reasons of your own, taken up this self-denying life, and I tell you that you can do far more good to your suffering fellow-creatures here than by seeking out cases in those vile streets. You will be safe from insult and from imposition. We have no impostors here. What do you say?”
She gave him her hand, and the next day Nurse Elisia came from her home—somewhere west, the other nurses said—and returned at night unquestioned, and after a week or two of jealousy and avoidance, as one different to themselves, the attendants one and all were won to respect and deference by acts, not words.