“Good God! what if I had let that woman go?”
All Hetty's native traits especially adapted her to the profession of nursing; and her superb physical health was of itself a blessing to every sick man or sick woman with whom she came in contact. Before she had been in Dr. Macgowan's house one week, all the patients had learned to listen in the morning for her step and her voice: they all wanted her, and begged to be put under her charge.
“Really, Mrs. Smailli, I shall have to cut you up into parcels,” said the doctor one day: “there is not enough of you to go round. You have a marvellous knack at making sick people like you. Did you really never nurse before?”
“Not with my hands and feet,” replied Hetty, “but I think I have always been a nurse at heart. I have always been so well that to be sick seems to me the most dreadful thing in the world. I believe it is the only trouble I couldn't bear.”
“You do not look as if you had ever had any very hard trouble of any kind,” said the doctor in a light tone, but watching keenly the effect of his words.
Dr. Macgowan was beginning to be tormented by a great desire to know more in regard to his new nurse. Father Antoine's guarded replies to all his inquiries about her had only stimulated his curiosity.
“She is a good woman. You may trust her with all your house,” Father Antoine had said; and had told the doctor that he had known both her and her father twenty years ago. More than this he would not say, farther than to express the opinion that she would live and die in St. Mary's, and devote herself to her work so long as she lived.
“She has for it a grand vocation, as we say.”
Father Antoine exclaimed, “A grand vocation! Ah! if we but had her in our convent!”
“You'll never get her there as long as I'm alive, Father Antoine!” Dr. Macgowan had replied. “You may count upon that.”