Miss Brettan had been Nurse Brettan several years, when an actor who had met with an accident was brought into the hospital. The mishap had cost him his engagement, and he bewailed his fate to everyone who would listen. The person who heard most was she, since it was she who had the most to do for him, and she began by feeling sympathetic. He was a paying patient, or he would have had to limp away much sooner; as it was, it was many weeks before he was pronounced well enough to leave. And during those weeks she remembered what in the years of routine she had forgotten--that she was a woman capable of love. One evening she learnt that the man really cared for her; he asked her to marry him. She stooped, and across the supper-tray, they kissed. Then she went upstairs, and cried with joy, and there was no happier woman in or out of any hospital in Christendom. He talked to her about himself more than ever after this, suppressing only the one fact that he lacked the courage to avow. And when at last he went away their engagement was made public, and it was settled that she should join him in London as soon as he was able to write for her to come. There were many expressions of good-will heaped upon Nurse Brettan on the summer morning that she bade the Yaughton Hospital good-bye; a joint wedding-gift from the other nurses was presented, and everybody shook her hand and wished her a life of happiness, for she was popular. Carew met her at Euston. He had written that he had dropped into a good part, anti that they would shortly be starting together on the tour, but that in the meanwhile they were to be married in town. It was the first time she had been to London. He took her to lodgings in Guilford Street, and here occurred their great scene. He confessed that when he was a boy he had made a wild marriage; he had not set eyes on the woman since he discovered her past, but the law would not annul his blunder. He was bound to a harlot, and he loved Mary. Would she forgive his deception and be his wife in everything except the ceremony that could not be performed? It was a very terrible scene indeed. For a long while he believed her lost to him; she could be brought to give ear to his entreaties only by force, and he upbraided himself for not having disclosed his position in the first instance. He had excused his cowardice by calling it "expedience," but, to do him justice, he did not do justice to himself. The delay had been due far less to his sense of its expedience than to the tremors of his cowardice. Now he suffered scarcely less than she.