“The 45th Fusiliers,” she said. “They are at Aldershot now. My brother called here to see me the other day.” “Can there—could there, by any possibility, be any acquaintance between your brother and our patient?” suggested Hugh. Nurse Bryant completely negatived the idea. Her brother had enlisted in a huff. He had been very silly about his employer’s daughter, and there had been a family row, which was the actual cause of his taking the Queen’s shilling. “Has she not confided in you—I mean about her family—her affairs?” asked Hugh. “Has she told you—nothing?” “Not—one—word—not even a hint,” emphatically said the nurse. Miss Bryant confessed herself more absolutely ignorant of the dying girl’s antecedents, as well as of her actual thoughts and feelings, than she had been of those of any patient up to the present time. “Try and gain her confidence,” was Hugh’s urgent advice to the nurse. He returned to the hospital more than usually thoughtful. Next day, when he visited her, he asked her whether she had any dread as to the termination of her illness. A faint colour rose to her cheek. “Oh!” she said, clutching nervously at the sheet with her emaciated fingers, “_do_ you think I shall die?” It was the hopeful eagerness with which patients generally asked him, “Do you think I shall get well?” Hugh began to see light. “You speak almost as if you did not wish to live,” he said gravely. “Surely that cannot be. You are young, and neither I nor Dr. Hildyard think that there is any real reason why you should not be restored to your old active life, and to your friends.” Her eyelids drooped. “I have—no—friends,” she said, with effort. “I left my elder sister and brother, and went on the stage. They have not forgiven me. I have no parents. They are dead.” “But——” Hugh hesitated a moment. “You know I have heard all about you,” he said. “You were making success after success in various provincial towns—you must have already had scores of admiring friends among the public when that unfortunate accident occurred.” “Accident!” she said, scornfully. “That was no accident.” “It could not possibly have been anything else,” said, Hugh, warmly. “No human being could have been so brutal——” “No one—was—brutal,” she said; her breathing rapid with the fatigue and excitement of speaking. “I—did it—myself. I—flung myself down—and pulled the scene—with me. It came to me—suddenly. I felt I could not live—any—longer.”