“This is not our work,” you say, “this is the work of men.” Be it so if you like. Let them be the hands to do it: but who, if not women, are to be the hearts of the redemption of the poor from social wrong?

When the ladies reached their own room that night, Mildred began at once with something which was, evidently, uppermost in her mind.

“Aunt Janet, do you believe in special providences?”

“Do I not, dear! you know my life has been full of them.”

“Well, auntie, it seems absurd that every action of our lives should be interesting to Heaven, but I think I was sent to Granada as the great turning-point in my life.”

“Nothing very wonderful in that, if you believe that the hairs of our heads are all numbered, and that a sparrow does not fall to the ground without our Father’s knowledge. But what do you mean? Have you met your fate in the hero of Granada?”

“No, no! Nothing in the least romantic, but I have decided on my mission in life; you know I have been a long time on the look-out for it.”

“I always thought your mission, dear, was to make everyone the happier for having come in contact with you.”

“Ah, but you are an infatuated auntie, you know, and have always spoiled me, as papa did; but aren’t you anxious to know what I am going to be?”

“Something quixotic, Millie, to suit our surroundings. It is the couleur locale which has dazzled you; the romance of the Alhambra is too much for you. Is it a novelist or a poet? Don’t dear; the market is overstocked. Now, domestic service offers a grand field.”

“But I don’t feel it to be my vocation. I shall set to work to revolutionise the system of our great hospitals. I have seen enough to-day to convince me that, as at present constituted, they do as much harm as good.”

“Revolutionise the hospitals! Isn’t that rather ‘a large order?’”

“Weaker women than I have done greater things than this; and then remember, auntie dear, the lines—

Besides, don’t you think the public is almost ready for a revolution on this question?”

“You know, Mildred, my opinion; but I never could see my way clear to any interference with hospitals. It is a terrible responsibility, don’t you think?”

“Poor papa has often declared to me that the public would one day wake up to the fact that the hospital was one of the great shams of the time.”

“I know, dear. But St. Bernard’s having made your papa’s fame and fortune, isn’t it rather a shame to upset the concern?”

“I have no desire to upset anything. Don’t you remember how we rebuilt our parish church at Welby, without stopping the services for a single day? That is what I want to do in this case.”

“I don’t quite follow you, dear.”

“Well, of course I haven’t formed any complete scheme yet; but I have often thought that what we want in London, for instance, is a sort of Hospital University, with a great number of affiliated colleges of healing. Not a great unwieldy Cathedral of Surgery as they call it, here and there, but a ‘Chapel of Ease’ at every sufferer’s door. Fifty beds should be the limit, I think.”

“Not enough. Don’t you know the examining bodies do not recognise as a teaching hospital one with less than two hundred beds?”

“But I am concerned with healing the sick, not with teaching students.”

“Just so; but where are your future doctors to come from if you cut off their only way of learning their business?”

“Do you really believe the present system is the only way of training medical men and medical women, for I recognise the right and advantage of women students?”

“Your papa has often told me that a doctor can only be liberally educated by being enabled to draw his conclusions from a great number of facts; and, as each case has some peculiar feature, the more cases he sees, even of the same disease, the more the intelligent pupil will learn.”

“I see the force of that,” replied Mildred, “but I think my scheme would meet it. I would make use of the great pauper infirmaries, at present entirely wasted, as schools of medicine.”

“I fear they would prove very imperfect substitutes for the great hospitals. I am told, and I can readily understand it to be the fact, that the cases which gravitate to the parish infirmary are usually chronic diseases, old-standing bronchitic, asthmatic, and rheumatic troubles, with bed cases innumerable; and all of little or no use to the student.”

“But wait, aunt; you have only heard of one side of my plan; it provides for a vast and efficient system of out-door treatment. I strongly object to rushing every troublesome phase of disease away from home, and placing it in a great hospital. My indoor scheme would only embrace such cases as could not wisely be treated in the family. What at present do you take to be the chief passport to a bed in a general hospital?”

“The malady which has the greatest interest for the doctor who has power to admit it.”

“Precisely. But, as it is not the doctors who support the hospitals, don’t you think the intentions of the subscribers are often defeated by this system? Is it not, in fact, getting money under false pretences to ask for funds to help sick folk, and then apply them to even so good a purpose as medical education?”

“I think you put it too strongly, Mildred. The public does understand that in supporting the hospital, they are training their doctors.”

“Then,” said Mildred, “the fraud is on the patients. Lady Ponsonby de Tompkyns gives a big cheque to the hospitals, that she may have confidence that no new remedies may first be used upon her. Like the lady of the Fly papers, who

You see, the public is in this dilemma—either they are deceived as to the way patients are treated, or if not then the poor sufferers are misled to their grievous hurt.”

“I know of terrible things which Sister Agnes has told me,” said Aunt Janet; “and I am afraid more goes on than even she knows. Your father told me of a case of puerperal fever which was clearly one of licensed murder. He protested, but in vain. A poor woman recently confined was suffering from hyperpyrexia, which no drugs would abate. The physician in charge had become enamoured of the iced-water-bath treatment, and the wretched woman was the first victim at St. Bernard’s to the new fad. She was kept for four hours a day in the cold water at her bedside. When she died, her relatives all protested she was murdered.”

“That must have discredited the treatment rather.”

“Not at all; they persevered in ‘giving the thing a fair trial.’ The Germans invented it, and said it was very effectual in bringing down high temperatures. At St. Bernard’s, it brought the patients down, and the doctors could not bring them up again: and, as all the cases died, the authorities stopped the experiments; but some of the physicians declare to this day, I believe, that ‘there was something in it, after all.’ Mr. Crowe was very strongly in favour of it; he said it was physiologically right, and therefore must be so medically.”

“But perhaps the patients would all have died, any way,” said Mildred.

“Very likely; but what cruel torture in your last moments to be served like that!”

“Yes, that is the horrible part of the business. At an hospital, you cannot even die in peace; you are in danger of being the subject of some ghastly medical freak while there is a gasp left in you.”

“Yet, as the doctor must necessarily be an autocrat in his treatment, I don’t see how you can interfere with him,” mused Aunt Janet.

“Oh, can’t you! Do you think they would dare do such things in a parish infirmary? What a pretty storm there would be if our Mr. Hilbourne, for instance, heard of such things at St. Mark’s Workhouse! Don’t you think the doctors content themselves with using the best of their already acquired knowledge there?” asked Mildred.

“Yet, the poor think much more highly of hospital than of infirmary treatment.”

“Naturally. It is drummed into them a hundred times a day by everybody in the place, that everything is being done for their benefit. Papa told me of ‘a very pretty knee case’ which had been fourteen months in the wards, merely because it was an object of surgical interest, and was the subject of a monograph.”

“Your scheme, I fear, would not provide for monographs!”

“I fear you think I am very quixotic, aunt.”

“No, dear; you are not tilting at windmills, but at real dragons, which I am afraid are much too strong for you! But we must think it over. Dr. Graves is a good, sensible man, and though of course wrapped up in the conventionalism of his class is still open to reason. You will want more armour, and a sharper sword than Isabella’s for this fight, I am thinking.”

“Yet, I can see,” said the girl, “in my prophetic vision, our Boabdil giving me the key of the fortress, if we go to work properly. Meanwhile, let us build our Santa Fe.”

“Castles in Spain! dear—just the place for them. I can see ghosts of giant physiologists and vampire surgeons guarding the treasures of their vermilion towers, and warning you off their premises.”

“I don’t fear them, aunt. I shall visit Isabella’s tomb again for courage, though.”

“I think we had better sleep over this. Buenas noches, seÑorita.”

“Con dios.”

When the time came to leave Granada, Aunt Janet noticed that her niece was in rather low spirits. She guessed the cause, for it was manifest she was more than interested in the young doctor; and though it was difficult to say whether her interest was more in his work than in himself, or the contrary, she was glad that something had arisen to rouse the girl from the grief which had weighed upon her since her father’s death. That was the charm of Aunt Janet—she always accepted accomplished facts with equanimity, and perhaps was rather a fatalist. If Mildred was really in love, so much the better—she thought it would replace the lost light which had gone out of her life; and if, still better, she had really found a great philanthropic object in life, why the meeting with young Elsworth was the best thing that could have happened.

Would it not be strange if it should turn out that Elsworth’s exile to Granada, and their visit, should be the centre round which the lives of two noble souls should revolve?