“What then?” said the physician, severely.
Poor Hetty! She rose to her feet; but, recollecting that she had no right to be indignant, sat down, and replied in a trembling voice:
“I cannot tell you, sir, any thing about my trouble. I have come here to live, and I want to be a nurse.”
“Father Antoine knows me,” she added, with dignity.
Father Antoine's name was a passport. Doctor Macgowan had often wished that he could have all his nurses from the convent.
“You are a Catholic, then?” he said.
“No, indeed!” exclaimed Hetty, emphatically. “I am nothing of the sort.”
“How is it that you mention Father Antoine, then?”
“He knew my father well, and me also, years ago; and he is the only friend I have here.”
Dr. Macgowan had an Englishman's instinctive dislike of unexplained things and mysterious people. But Hetty's face and voice were better than pedigrees and certificates. Her confident reference to Father Antoine was also enough to allay any immediate uneasiness, and, “for the rest, time will show,” thought the doctor; and, without any farther delay, he engaged Hetty as one of the day nurses in his establishment. In after years Dr. Macgowan often looked back to this morning, and thought, with the sort of shudder with which one looks back on a danger barely escaped: