"It is useless." She set her lips firmly. "I am sorry to refuse your request, but the call of duty I must obey. My arrangements are all made. Norah is to stay and to take care of my home. My visit to Portsmouth this morning was for the purpose of leaving Lulu's precious charge in the hands of a dear Christian friend; so," trying to win him to smile by an affected lightness, "you may tell your mother she will have company she did not anticipate, though you were so ungallant as to persuade me not to come." "When a woman will she will." She carried her point against the entreaties of all her friends, and in less than two weeks, three dusty travelers--weary in body, but very strong in prayerful resolves and hopes--were entered as assistants in nursing in one of the crowded hospitals of the desolated, plague-stricken city of Memphis. CHAPTER XXIII. IN MEMPHIS. "To be found untired, Watching the stars out by the bed of pain, With a pale cheek, and yet a brow inspired, And a true heart of hope, though hope be vain, Meekly to bear with wrong, to cheer decay, And, oh! to love through all things--therefore pray." --HEMANS. One of Grace's first acts after reaching Memphis was to inquire for her relatives, whom she had not seen, and but seldom heard from, since leaving Memphis, in her sixteenth year, to make her own way in the hard world. Not that she owed them much affection, or any gratitude--only the natural respect and remembrance of kinship induced her to seek them out. But her efforts were not crowned with success, for she learned that they had been among the first of the native families to flee the city at the approach of the pestilence, and Grace was greatly disappointed thereat. For a few weeks her voluntarily assumed duties were arduous and embarrassing in the extreme. Mrs. Clendenon and Willard, having had the fever themselves, and having been witnesses of its ravages in their own city, entered at once with confidence and experience on the task of caring for the poor victims who filled the hospitals, and even private houses. To Grace it was all new, and strange, and terrible, and though her will was strong, her sensitive spirit quailed at the horrors she daily saw, so unused was she to these scenes, and so diffident of her own powers for service, that she half doubted her abilities, and was, for a time, overwhelmed by the feeling which we have all experienced at times of willingness to perform duties from which we are deterred by ignorance, or lacking self-confidence. But this feeling was not long suffered to deter her from usefulness. Laborers were too sadly needed in the terrible harvest of death, and as her increasing familiarity with the details of the awful disease rendered her more efficient, she became an invaluable nurse to the patients, and a reliable and prized aid to the physician of the ward where she was placed.