In the course of her services in the hospital, and afterwards among the poor, she had seen many a case of sore distress which she had been unable to relieve. If she had riches she could accomplish much that was now impossible; she could do good in many ways; she could relieve suffering and aid the impoverished and help the feeble far more adroitly and skilfully than could any woman who had always been wealthy, and who had not had her experience of life and of its misfortunes and its miseries. She thought that she knew her own character, and she believed that she had strength to withstand the temptations which beset the rich. Thinking herself unselfish, she held herself incapable of keeping for herself alone any good fortune that might come to her. And she made a solemn resolve that if she should marry the man who stood ready to take her to wife she would devote to good works the greater part of her money and of her time. She would dress as became her station, of course, and she would entertain sumptuously too; but no old man should ever be turned shivering from her door when she was giving a dinner of twenty-four. Her revery was interrupted half a dozen times by the fits of coughing which shook her patient, and which seemed to her to become more and more frequent and more violent. At half-past nine she gave him his medicine again, and took his temperature once more. Then she made up the fire, which burned badly; and she straightened the sheets on his bed, and turned the pillows. He soon sank to slumber again, breathing heavily and turning uneasily in his sleep. The house was singularly still, and no sound of the dinner party below reached the nurse in the corner room above. When she happened to go into the dressing-room she found there awaiting her a tray with several dishes from the dinner table. She was glad to have something to eat, and she sat down by the window to enjoy it. The thick, soft snow had silenced nearly all the usual street sounds. The carriages that went up and down the avenue were as inaudible as though they were rolling on felt. But sleighing parties became more frequent, and she found a suggestion of pleasant companionship and of human activity in the jingle of the bells. Once a fire-engine sped swiftly past the house, its usual roar deadened by the heavy snow, and its whistle shrilling forth as it neared the side streets, one after another; ten minutes later it came slowly back. The nurse was glad that there was only a false alarm, for she knew how terrible a fire would be in a crowded tenement-house on such a night. She finished her belated dinner a few minutes after the deep tones of the clock in the hall had told her that it was ten, and that there were left of the old year but two hours more. Except when the sick man waked with a cough, the next hour was wholly eventless.