It was the sudden appearance of Jane Kelly that thoroughly aroused her. Had a rattlesnake forced itself across her bed, it is doubtful if she would have shrunk from it more nervously. The sight of that face brought all the transactions of the night before to her mind, and she called out, “Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me!” “Who wants to touch you, woman, after a drunken sleep like that? Be quiet now, or I’ll have you turned out of the hospital.” Mary Margaret gazed on the woman in speechless astonishment. “Drunken!—me! me!” Here the poor woman burst into a passion of angry, fierce crying, for the insult of that insinuation stung her like a wasp. “Yes, woman, you, you! The doctor saw you; all the women in the ward saw you, lying there dead in for it. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have overlaid that cub of yours and smothered him. Don’t look at me in that way. You ought to hide your head.” Mary Margaret’s eyes were wide open now. She charged with drinking—she, who never touched a drop year in and year out, not even when Dillon brought his friends to their home, or took her out to a wake. The charge was abominable. “Jane Kelly,” she said, rubbing the tears from her eyes; “you know that there isn’t a word of truth in what you say. It wasn’t brandy, but something worse, ten thousand times worse, that I took.” “And what was that?” inquired Jane, placing her arms akimbo and taking altogether a fighting attitude, which rather terrified Mary Margaret, for she was not strong enough for a combat, had any idea of the kind been in her thought. “I don’t know what it was, but there was morphine in it and it put me into a sleep that was like dying.” Jane Kelly laughed violently, holding her sides and appealing to the women around her with repeated nods of the head. “Morphine, was it? ha! ha! and where did you get it? there now, where did you get it?” “I got it from the vial you put by that young crathur there, and told me to give her a taespoonful every once in a while. White it was, and I have the taste of it in my mouth this minute.” Jane Kelly darted down to the young woman’s bed and brought back a vial half full of some red liquid. “White, is it?” she cried, holding the vial up to the general gaze, “and morphine? ha! ha!—just a taste of innocent paregoric, that wouldn’t hurt the baby in her arms, if she fed it to him by the teaspoonful. Why there isn’t an hour’s sleep in the whole of it. No, no, I’ll show you where she got her morphine.” Here Jane made a dive under Mrs. Dillon’s bed, and came forth with a junk bottle, which she shook triumphantly in sight of all the curious eyes drawn upon her by this discussion. “Empty!” she exclaimed, “not a drop left. This woman drinks morphine by the bottleful! ha-ha! by the bottleful!”