Yet poor Annie had no light apprenticeship to serve. The programme, which extends from making poultices and making beds to receiving doctors' instructions, understanding them, remembering them, and acting on them, is neither short nor easy, though a fairly good and trained intellect and an unswerving devotion to duty will get through it triumphantly in time. Annie underwent the entire ordeal, while she doubtless brought a little additional intelligence and capacity and a few more grains of experience to the task than would have existed if she had not been Dr. Millar's daughter. In spite of the warm woollen jacket and cuffs which she wore under her linen gown, her little hands were covered with the chaps and chilblains which are the scourge of maids-of-all-work, because of their early rising, hard scrubbing, and the frequency with which their fingers are wet and dried on chill winter mornings. Her legs ached, as they had never ached after a night's dancing, with being on her feet all day long, and day after day, waiting on her patients and attending on the sisters who were placed over the respective wards. Her mind, too, was kept on the stretch with the serious charge of pulses and temperatures, with the grave responsibility of shelves on shelves of medicine bottles, with acquiring the best modes of bandaging, fomenting, bleeding, stopping the flow of blood, so that during the little leisure she had she could not turn to a book for relief; she fell asleep with sheer fatigue more frequently. Annie was too high-spirited and independent to feel the loneliness of her position among strangers, whom she soon converted into friendly acquaintances, if nothing more, as many a girl--as Dora, for instance--would have done. But, accustomed as Annie had been all her life to much closer and warmer relations, she clung to the presence of Rose in London; and it was a proof of how much the elder sister was used up, when, even on her days and hours for getting out, it was often with difficulty that she could bring herself to go and see Rose, or to meet and walk a portion of the way with her on Rose's progress from Mrs. Jennings's boarding-house to the Misses Stone's school, where she taught drawing, or to Mr. St. Foy's art classes, where she learned it.