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“I am glad you could come, Miss Randolph. You were with Miss Hudson last week when I operated?”

I bowed. To save my life I couldn’t have spoken without blushing the redder.

“I noticed your bright face at the time. Brightness, I think, is what Mrs. Maradick needs. She finds her day nurse depressing.” His eyes rested so kindly upon me that I have suspected since that he was not entirely unaware of my worship. It was a small thing, heaven knows, to flatter his vanity — a nurse just out of a training-school — but to some men no tribute is too insignificant to give pleasure.

“You will do your best, I am sure.” He hesitated an instant — just long enough for me to perceive the anxiety beneath the genial smile on his face — and then added gravely: “We wish to avoid, if possible, having to send her away for treatment.”

I could only murmur in response, and after a few carefully chosen words about his wife’s illness, he rang the bell and directed the maid to take me up-stairs to my room. Not until I was ascending the stairs to the third story did it occur to me that he had really told me nothing. I was as perplexed about the nature of Mrs. Maradick’s malady as I had been when I entered the house.

I found my room pleasant enough. It had been arranged — by Doctor Maradick’s request, I think — that I was to sleep in the house, and after my austere little bed at the hospital I was agreeably surprised by the cheerful look of the apartment into which the maid led me. The walls were papered in roses, and there were curtains of flowered chintz at the window, which looke
d down on a small formal garden at the rear of the house. This the maid told me, for it was too dark for me to distinguish more than a marble fountain and a fir-tree, which looked old, though I afterward learned that it was replanted almost every season.

In ten minutes I had slipped into my uniform and was ready to go to my patient; but for some reason — to this day I have never found out what it was that turned her against me at the start — Mrs. Maradick refused to receive me. While I stood outside her door I heard the day nurse trying to persuade her to let me come in. It wasn’t any use, however, and in the end I was obliged to go back to my room and wait until the poor lady got over her whim and consented to see me. That was long after dinner — it must have been nearer eleven than ten o’clock — and Miss Peterson was quite worn out by the time she came to fetch me.

“I’m afraid you’ll have a bad night,” she said as we went down-stairs together. That was her way, I soon saw, to expect the worst of everything and everybody.

“Does she often keep you up like this?”

“Oh, no, she is usually very considerate. I never knew a sweeter character. But she still has this hallucination — “

Here again, as in the scene with Doctor Maradick, I felt that the explanation had only deepened the mystery. Mrs. Maradick’s hallucination, whatever form it assumed, was evidently a subject for evasion and subterfuge in the household. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask, “What is her hallucination?” — but before I could get the words past my lips we had reached Mrs. Maradick’s door, and Miss Peterson motioned me to be silent. As the door opened a little way to admit me, I saw that Mrs. Maradick was already in bed, and that the lights were out except for a night-lamp burning on a candle-stand beside a book and a carafe of water.