"My recovery was rapid. At the end of a fortnight I was moved into the convalescents' ward, and was fed up with wine and meat in abundance. I had every reason to be thankful for all the kindness bestowed on me in the hospital, and all the good effect God permitted that kindness to have. But one thing troubled me very much and cut me to the quick. Ever since I had been in the hospital my sister had neither been to see me, nor sent to inquire after me. It was no very difficult business to account for her neglect of me. She had her good qualities (even in the height of my anger I could not deny that), but she was of a very proud high temper. She could sacrifice anything but her pride for love of me. I had gone into an hospital, had received public charity, and she hadn't courage to acknowledge a sister who had sunk so low as that! But if she was proud so was I; I could be as high and haughty as she; and, what was more, I would show her that I could be so! What, to leave her own sister--her only sister--who had worked for her when she was little, and who had loved her as her own heart! I would resent it! Perhaps fortune might yet have a turn to make in my favour; and if so I would in my prosperity remember how I had been treated in my adversity. I am filled with shame now, when I think on the revengeful imaginations which followed each other through my breast. I am thankful that when my animosity was at its height my sister did not present herself before me; for had she done so, I fear that, without waiting for an explanation from her, I should have spoken hasty words that (however much I might have afterwards repented them, and she forgiven them) would have rendered it impossible for us to be again the same as we were before. I never mentioned to any one--nurse or patient--in the convalescent ward, the secret of my clouded brows, or let out that I had a friend in the world to think of me or to neglect me. Hour after hour I listened to women and girls and young children, talking of home pleasures and longing to be quite well, and dismissed from the confinement of the hospital, and anticipating the pleasure which their husbands, or mothers, or sisters, or children, would express at welcoming them again; but I never gave a word of such gossip; I only hearkened, and compared their hopes with my desolation, morosely and vindictively. Before I was declared perfectly restored I got very tired of my imprisonment; indeed the whole time I was in the convalescent ward my life was wearisome, and without any of the pleasures which the first days of my sickness had had. There was only one inmate of the ward to which I was at first admitted, as yet, amongst the convalescents; none of them knew me, unless it was by my number--a new one now, for on changing my ward I had changed my number also. The nurses I didn't like so well as my first kind attendant; and I couldn't feel charitably, or in any way as a Christian ought to feel, to the poor people by whom I was