John looked ashamed. “If that is your view, sir,” he said, “I don't know what you'll say to what I've been doing since.”
“I've heard of it, and I confess I'm not pleased. Whatever your old protégée may be, my house is no place for her. I help to maintain charitable institutions for such cases, and I will ask you to lose no time in having her removed to the hospital.”
John was crushed. “Very well, sir, if that is your wish; only I thought you said my rooms——Besides, the poor old thing fills her place as well as Queen Victoria, and perhaps the angels are watching the one as much as the other.”
Next day John Storm called to see the old woman at Martha's Vineyard, and he saw the matron, the house doctor, and a staff nurse as well. His adventure was known to everybody at the hospital. Once or twice he caught looks of amused compassion, and heard a twitter of laughter. As he stood by the bed, the old woman muttered: “I knoo ez it wuzn't the work'us, my dear. He spoke to me friendly and squeedged my 'and.”
Coming through the wards he had looked for a face he could not see; but just then he was aware of a young woman, in the print dress and white apron of a nurse, standing in silence at the bed-head. It was Glory, and her eyes were wet with tears.
“You mustn't do such things,” she said hoarsely; “I can't bear it,” and she stamped her foot. “Don't you see that these people——”
But she turned about and was gone before he could reply. Glory was ashamed for him. Perhaps she had been taking his part! He felt the blood mounting to his face, and his cheeks tingling. Glory! His eyes were swimming, and he dared not look after her; but he could have found it in his heart to kiss the old bag of bones on the bed.
That night he wrote to the parson in the island: “Glory has left off her home garments, and now looks more beautiful than ever in the white simplicity of the costume of the nurse. Her vocation is a great one. God grant she may hold on to it!” Then something about the fallacy of ceremonial religion and the impossibility of pleasing God by such religious formalities. “But if we have publicans and Pharisees now, even as they existed in Christ's time, all the more service is waiting for that man for whom life has no ambitions, death no terrors. I thank God I am in a great measure dead to these things.... I will fulfil my promise to look after Glory. My constant prayer is against Agag. It is so easy for him to get a foothold in a girl's heart here. This great new world, with its fashions, its gaieties, its beauty, and its brightness—no wonder if a beautiful young girl, tingling with life and ruddy health, should burn with impatience to fling herself into the arms of it. Agag is in London, and as insinuating as ever.”