Milly had set out a cosy tea in the little front room that opened into the garden--some nice home-made bread (for Milly always did her own baking), some butter and blackberry jam, and a boiled egg and some toast--in case the traveller was hungry after her hot journey. The tea was in a brown earthenware pot--which, as everybody is not fortunate enough to know, makes the very best tea in the world--and the cloth was spotless, and the knives and spoons well polished. Nurse cast a satisfied glance round before she followed Milly to the little bedroom upstairs. She had had plenty of experience, and she knew the signs of good housekeeping almost at a glance. There was no carpet in the room, but the flooring was exquisitely clean; some white curtains of a material that Milly's grandmother, who had made them and hung up forty years ago, had called "dimity;" the little wooden bedstead stood a little out from the wall, and the sheets and pillow-cases were as white as careful washing could make them. A rush-bottomed chair and a little table, with the necessary washing apparatus, completed the furniture. A jug of hot water stood in the basin, and a pair of clean towels and a fresh piece of brown Windsor soap looked inviting.
Nurse sat down and removed her bonnet, opened her little black hand-bag, and took out a sponge and a brush and comb; and Milly, with a pleasant "hope she found all to her liking," slipped away to make the tea. She had asked Mrs. Crowe to stay and have a cup with them, for she was, not unnaturally, a little shy of her new lodger. It was her first experience of having any one but her grandfather to look after, and she felt a little anxious.
As soon as tea was over Milly put a note into the nurse's hands. It had been left there, she said, by the doctor, who would be much obliged, did not nurse feel too tired, if she would come to him in the cool of the evening, and he would explain her duties to her.
The conversation naturally turned on the prevailing topic of the typhoid epidemic. Nurse, who had been a couple of years in a London hospital, had had a good deal of experience of this fever, and she told her listeners many interesting things which were useful for them to know just then. She was a pleasant-faced, kind-looking woman of about forty years of age, with a slightly dictatorial manner, which was perhaps the result of her training; for she had worked for several years as parish nurse in poor districts, and often, as she told them, met with terrible ignorance, and that obstinacy which so often accompanies it. People _would_ not believe in infection, she said; they would not take the most ordinary, the most simple precautions; and what was worse, when they had learned by the bitter experience of the loss of, perhaps, their nearest and their dearest, they still persisted in the utter disregard of cleanliness and health.