Then Margaret buried her face in the bed-clothes and wept, and Mrs Tom, weeping also, hid herself behind the curtains.

There was nothing said then about money or the troubles of the business, and after a while the two women went down to tea. In the dining-room they found Mr Rubb, who seemed to be quite at home in the house. Cold meat was brought up for Margaret’s dinner, and they all sat down to one of those sad sick-house meals which he or she who has not known must have been lucky indeed. To Margaret it was nothing new. All the life that she remembered, except the last year, had been spent in nursing her other brother; and now to be employed about the bed-side of a sufferer was as natural to her as the air she breathed.

“I will sit with him to-night, Sarah, if you will let me,” she said; and Sarah assented.

It was still daylight when she found herself at her post. Mrs Mackenzie had just left the room to go down among the children, saying that she would return again before she left him for the night. To this the invalid remonstrated, begging his wife to go to bed.

“She has not had her clothes off for the last week,” said the husband.

“It don’t matter about my clothes,” said Mrs Tom, still weeping. She was always crying when in the sick room, and always scolding when out of it; thus complying with the two different requisitions of her nature. The matter, however, was settled by an assurance on her part that she would go to bed, so that she might be stirring early.

There are women who seem to have an absolute pleasure in fixing themselves for business by the bedside of a sick man. They generally commence their operations by laying aside all fictitious feminine charms, and by arraying themselves with a rigid, unconventional, unenticing propriety. Though they are still gentle,—perhaps more gentle than ever in their movements,—there is a decision in all they do very unlike their usual mode of action. The sick man, who is not so sick but what he can ponder on the matter, feels himself to be like a baby, whom he has seen the nurse to take from its cradle, pat on the back, feed, and then return to its little couch, all without undue violence or tyranny, but still with a certain consciousness of omnipotence as far as that child was concerned. The vitality of the man is gone from him, and he, in his prostrate condition, debarred by all the features of his condition from spontaneous exertion, feels himself to be more a woman than the woman herself. She, if she be such a one as our Miss Mackenzie, arranges her bottles with precision; knows exactly how to place her chair, her lamp, and her teapot; settles her cap usefully on her head, and prepares for the night’s work certainly with satisfaction. And such are the best women of the world,—among which number I think that Miss Mackenzie has a right to be counted.