John waved his hand with an air of almost derision. ‘Do you suppose I’m thinking of that? It’s gone far beyond that.’ ‘What can be beyond that?’ cried the employer, with exasperation. Then he seized the young man by the arm. ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I am afraid I must have a cab,’ said John, with his confused look, ‘for quickness; besides that I couldn’t walk. All my strength’s gone out of me.’ ‘But what are you doing? What has happened? Where are you going now?’ John looked at his chief, the friend of so many years, with a piteous smile. ‘I am going to find out--if there’s any hope for me--what’s to become of me,’ he said. CHAPTER VII. MRS. SANDFORD’S VIEW. Mrs. Sandford sat in her matron’s room in the light of the bay windows, making up her accounts as usual. She was regulating the lists of linen in the hospital, the surgical appliances, the provisions of all kinds. Her round of the wards had been made. The nurses had given their reports, the special cases had been visited. Her day’s work, so to speak, was done. The afternoon was the time for rest. She was occupying it, as she often did, in this necessary, but not ostentatious work, upon which so much of the comfort of the little community devoted to healing and merciful service, depended. Mrs. Sandford was known to be a great administrator: nothing was ever wanting, nothing to seek, under her management; her stores never ran out. But she was so used to this work of regulation and oversight that she did not find it very interesting. Sometimes she would lay down her pen, sometimes even lean back in her chair, which was not, however, a seductive lounge, but an ample, comfortable Chippendale, in which you sat upright very much at your ease, but had no encouragement to loll. She had things to think of apart from the hospital. A letter lay on her table among all her lists and account-books, which was from Susie, and there were things in it which made this mother, who, after all, though perhaps of sterner fibre than most, was still of the same stuff from which ordinary mothers are made--both smile and sigh. Susie’s life was undergoing new developments. A certain commotion was in it of new forces awakening, and new thoughts. Perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, Susie was not likely to make such revelations as would justify any critic in saying that she was ‘in love'; but there were in her letter indications, little eddies which proved how the current went, straws that showed how the wind was blowing. For one thing, she kept up a continual comparison between two unknown persons, of which she herself was evidently unconscious, but which her mother perceived gradually by dint of repetition. ‘Mr. Percy Spencer tells me’--‘but Mr. Cattley says:’--she had told her mother at first all about her visitors, and how these two came and went, and talked of John. Susie had a great deal to say, too, of Elly, and had