“I do need you.  Three is such a stupid number.  You will enjoy Dr. Leaver and he will enjoy you.  Come, my dear girl, don’t spend any more time remonstrating, but do your hair and put on this simple frock, which I’m confident will just suit you.  You’re a bit taller, I know, but the dress is long for me, and will be quite the right length for you.  Sit down here at my dressing-table, and let me help you dry that beautiful hair.  I’ve often longed to see it all unconfined, and now I’m going to have the chance.”

As she spoke she slipped on a loose protecting garment above her lilac daintiness, and waved an inviting hand to her guest, smiling so coaxingly that Miss Mathewson yielded without another word of protest.  When the hairpins came out, and the mass of fair hair fell upon the shoulders, Ellen exclaimed with hearty admiration: 

“I knew it was wonderful hair, but I didn’t dream there was such a wealth.  My dear, why do you wear it in such a tight fashion, as if you wanted everybody to think there wasn’t much of it?  Do let me try dressing it for you in a way I know, which it seems to me would just suit your face.  Have you always worn it coiled on top of your head, and shall you feel very strange and uncomfortable if I arrange it lower?”

“Do it as you like, Mrs. Burns, since you will be so kind.  But don’t expect me not to feel strange, wearing your clothes and staying to dinner.  Do you realize how far from society I’ve lived, all these years that I’ve been nursing for Dr. Burns?”

“I know you are a lady, and that is quite enough.  And our simple dinner isn’t ‘society,’ it’s home.  Now, please keep quite still, and don’t distract my mind, while I lay these smooth strands in place.  I want every one to lie in just this shining order.”

Ellen worked at her self-appointed task with all the interest of the born artist, who has an ever-present dream of things as they ought to look.  When the last confining pin was in place she viewed the fair head before her from every point, then clapped her hands delightedly, and presented Miss Mathewson with a hand-mirror.

“You must get the side view, then you’ll recognize how these new lines bring out that distinguished profile that’s been obscured all this time.  Do you see?  Do you know yourself, my dear?  Won’t you always wear it this way, to please me?”

“But I never could do it myself, in the world,” pleaded Amy Mathewson, her cheeks again flooding with colour at the strange sight of herself.

“It’s perfectly simple, and I’ll teach you with pleasure,—­only not now, for we must hurry.  I’ll slip the frock over your head without disturbing a hair, and then we’ll go down, for I want a bit of a blaze on the hearth in the living-room, to offset this dull-gray sky.”

On went the frock in question, a “simple” one, undoubtedly, but of the sort of simplicity which tells its own story to the initiated.  Whether its new wearer recognized or not its perfection of detail, she could but see that it suited her to a nicety, both in hue—­a soft apricot shade—­and in its absence of elaboration.  Its effect was to soften every line of the face above it, and to set off its wearer’s delicate colouring as the white uniforms could never do.