If Katy Suggested that on the way home she should leave a prescription at the chemists, it was: `We sisters are for nursing only; we do not visit shops.' And when she was asked if she could make beef tea, she replied calmly but decisively: `We are not cooks.'

In fact, all that Sister Ambrogia seemed able or willing to do, beyond the bathing of Amy's face and brushing her hair, which she accomplished handily, was to sit by the bedside telling her rosary, or plying a little ebony shuttle in the manufacture of a long Strip of tatting. Even this amount of usefulness was interfered with-by the fact that Amy, who by this time was in a Semi-delirious condition, had taken an aversion to her at the first glance, and was not willing to be left with her for a single moment.

`I won't stay here alone with Sister Embroidery,' she would cry, if her mother and Katy went into the next room for a moment's rest or a private consultation. `I hate Sister Embroidery Come back, Mamma, come back this moment! She's making faces at me, and chattering just like an old parrot, and I don't understand a word she says. Take Sister Embroidery away, Mamma, I tell you! Don't you hear me? Come back, I say!'

The little voice would be raised to a shrill scream, and Mrs Ashe and Katy, hurrying back, would find Amy sitting up on her pillow with wet, Scarlet-flushed cheeks and eyes bright with fever, ready to throw herself out of bed, while, calm as Mabel, whose curly head lay on the pillow beside her little mistress, Sister Ambrogia, unaware of the intricacies of the English language, was placidly felling her beads and muttering prayers to herself. Some of these prayers, I do not doubt, related to Amy's recovery' if not to her conversation, and were well meant, ut they were rather irritating, under the circumstances!