Day after day Evadne waited but her knight never asked for his answer.  She began to meet him professionally, for his reputation was steadily increasing, but he made no attempt to resume the conversation which had been so rudely interrupted.  He treated her with a delicate chivalry always—­that was John Randolph’s way—­and once she had caught such a strange, wistful expression on his face as he looked at her and then at a patient’s arm which she was deftly bandaging.  She was puzzled.  What could it all mean?  Well, God understood.

The surgical ward in the new Hospital at Marlborough was filled to its utmost capacity and Evadne found her work no sinecure.  The force of nurses was inadequate to the demand.  Often she would be called from her rest to minister to the critical cases which were her special care, and she would go down to the ward saying softly, “The Master is come and calleth for thee,” and bending tenderly over the sufferers, would behold as in a vision the face of Christ.

“My dear Miss Hildreth!” the superintendent exclaimed one day, “how is it that you make the patients love you so?”

Evadne laughed merrily.  “If they do,” she said, “it must be because of my love for them.”  And the Superintendent answered in a hushed voice, “Why, that is the Gospel!”

They called her ‘Sister,’ these rough men.  She liked it so.  She felt herself a sister to the world.

It was evening and the lights were turned low in the surgical ward.  Evadne was making her round before going to her room for a sorely needed rest.  John Randolph, who had come to pay a second visit to an interesting case in one of the medical wards, stood in the shadow of the doorway and watched her hungrily.  Each one wanted to say something and Evadne listened patiently.  To her the mission of a nurse meant something higher than gruel and bandages.  She never forgot as she ministered to the body that she was dealing with a soul.

John Randolph, standing with folded arms in the doorway, heard her low, sweet laugh, as she strove to brighten up a lachrymose patient; and caught at intervals the name of Jesus, as she reminded one and another of the Friend whose sympathy is strong enough to bear all the weight of human pain, and once he thought he heard the sweet note of a prayer.  He started forward.  Evadne was bending over a man who had been badly crippled in a saw mill.  His left arm was gone and all the fingers from his right hand.  With the morbidness of those who delight in concentrating attention upon their own sufferings, he had pulled off the loosened bandage with his teeth and held up the stump for inspection, and Evadne had laid her cool, soft hands on either side of the unsightly mass of red and angry flesh and was holding them there while she talked!

“She gives herself!” cried John Randolph with a great throb of longing.  “It is what Jesus did, in Galilee.”

A wave of passion broke over him.  It was not true, this story.  It could not be!  How could her nature, sweet as light, ever be attuned to that of her cynical cousin?  She was coming nearer, nearer.  He would stay and meet her.  He thought he had read his answer in her eyes.  Now he would have it from her lips as well.