Ellen rose, smiling, and came across the room to her. The two
figures, one in the severe white of a uniform, the other in the filmy,
lace-bordered white of a delicate house gown, met in the doorway.

"You dear, kind little person," said Red Pepper's wife, with her warm
hand on the nurse's arm, "how good it is of you to care! But I can wait.
Can't you stay in here with me, while the Doctor sees his patient?"

"I must help him. It's a broken leg, and I must go this minute," said
Miss Mathewson. But she paused for an instant more, looking at Ellen.
The nurse was the taller, and looked the older of the two, but the
affectionate phrase "little person" had somehow touched a heart which was
lonelier even than Ellen guessed--and Ellen guessed much more than Red
Pepper had ever done. Red Pepper's wife leaned forward.

"You and I must be good friends," said she, and Miss Mathewson responded
with a flush of pleasure. Then the nurse flew back to the office, while
Ellen, after listening for a little to the sounds of footsteps in the
office, turned back to the fire.

"How does it happen," said she musingly to herself, as she stood looking
down into the depths of the glowing heart of it, "that one woman can be
so rich and one so poor--under the same roof? She sees more of him than
I,--lives her life closer to him, in a way,--and yet I am rich and she is
poor. How I wish I could make her happy--as happy as she can be without
the one thing that would have made her so. O Red!--and you never saw it!"

The hour went by. The broken leg was set and bandaged, the injured man
was conveyed back to the wagon which had brought him; and Red Pepper
Burns took a last look at his patient, in the light of the lantern