Lizzie invited Audrey home to Boston for a weekend during spring break. Audrey had hesitated, not wanting to leave her mother, but Mrs. Beavis had agreed to stay with her for two days. Ellen’s condition had been stable for a while, but she caught a bad cold, and it had laid her low for more than a month. She had lost strength and some mobility afterwards. Whenever she got sick, the symptoms of her disease got slightly worse.

By the summer, after Audrey’s first year of nursing school, Ellen was well enough to go away to the seaside with Audrey for a week, which raised her spirits. Will got leave and joined them for part of it. It was wonderful being together again.

Lizzie went home for the summer, to stay at her family’s summer home in Maine. Both girls came back to Annapolis at the end of August feeling rested and ready to start their second year of nursing school. They were assigned to the hospital and were usually on different rotations. Audrey spent a month in the maternity ward, while Lizzie went to orthopedics, followed by a stint in pediatrics, including the nursery. By then Audrey had done a rotation in the TB ward. Their training exposed them to all the specialties, and once they graduated, they would have the choice of working in a hospital, a doctor’s office, or private-duty nursing, which was essentially what Audrey did for her mother. She had learned some additional treatments and techniques to make her mother more comfortable, which Ellen was grateful for. She was impressed by how much Audrey had learned.

Lizzie was in particularly good spirits when she returned to Annapolis and moved back into the dorm of the nursing school. She’d had a brief but fun summer romance with the older brother of an old friend. He was working at a summer job in Boston and came to his family’s home in Maine on weekends. It wasn’t serious, and they had both agreed that long-distance relationships were too hard so they didn’t try to prolong it. He was going into his senior year at Dartmouth, and was planning to work for a bank when he graduated. He was a nice boy and they’d spent some good times together, even if the romance didn’t have a future.