When I crossed the floor to the chair by Mrs. Maradick’s bed, she turned over on her side and looked at me with the sweetest and saddest smile. “You are the night nurse,” she said in a gentle voice; and from the moment she spoke I knew that there was nothing hysterical or violent about her mania—or hallucination, as they called it. “They told me your name, but I have forgotten it.” “Randolph—Margaret Randolph.” I liked her from the start, and I think she must have seen it. “You look very young, Miss Randolph.” “I am twenty-two, but I suppose I don’t look quite my age. People usually think I am younger.” For a minute she was silent, and while I settled myself in the chair by the bed, I thought how strikingly she resembled the little girl I had seen first in the afternoon, and then leaving her room a few moments before. They had the same small, heart-shaped faces, coloured ever so faintly; the same straight, soft hair, between brown and flaxen; and the same large, grave eyes, set very far apart under arched eyebrows. What surprised me most, however, was that they both looked at me with that enigmatical and vaguely wondering expression—only in Mrs. Maradick’s face the vagueness seemed to change now and then to a definite fear—a flash, I had almost said, of startled horror. I sat quite still in my chair, and until the time came for Mrs. Maradick to take her medicine not a word passed between us. Then, when I bent over her with the glass in my hand, she raised her head from the pillow and said in a whisper of suppressed intensity: “You look kind. I wonder if you could have seen my little girl?” As I slipped my arm under the pillow I tried to smile cheerfully down on her. “Yes, I’ve seen her twice. I’d know her anywhere by her likeness to you.” A glow shone in her eyes, and I thought how pretty she must have been before illness took the life and animation out of her features. “Then I know you’re good.” Her voice was so strained and low that I could barely hear it. “If you weren’t good you couldn’t have seen her.” I thought this queer enough, but all I answered was, “She looked delicate to be sitting up so late.” A quiver passed over her thin features, and for a minute I thought she was going to burst into tears. As she had taken the medicine, I put the glass back on the candle-stand, and bending over the bed, smoothed the straight brown hair, which was as fine and soft as spun silk, back from her forehead. There was something about her—I don’t know what it was—that made you love her as soon as she looked at you. “She always had that light and airy way, though she was never sick a day in her life,” she answered calmly after a pause. Then, groping for my hand, she whispered passionately, “You must not tell him—you must not tell any one that you have seen her!”