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194 more interest to her (or much more, anyway) than the other half-dozen doctors on her record-book.

"Would you be so kind, Miss Jerome," he had asked her in his quick crisp manner that night, approaching her desk where she sat knitting, "as to come to Room 20 and allow me to demonstrate on you a moment? I won't keep you long."

"Certainly," replied Reba.

"My pupils, none of them seem inclined to volunteer, though I could have managed any one of them easily enough," he explained, once back in his lecture-room.

One of the pupils tittered at that, and all of them smiled. Reba glanced with questioning eyes around the little group of half a dozen women gathered about the demonstration-bed. This class was composed of older women—ten or a dozen rather solidly built matrons, who had formed their own group and applied for an instructor. There was not one of them present to-night who weighed under one hundred and seventy-five pounds.

"Will you please lie down on the bed, Miss Jerome?" asked Dr. Booth. "I am going to lift you."

Reba swallowed at that, but made fast a hairpin or two, then obeyed; sitting down first on the edge of the high hospital bed, tucking her skirts about her ankles, and swinging both her feet up onto it; then lying back flat, with her hands folded across her chest, and at a loss to know where to look.

"She's not absolutely helpless," Dr. Booth explained in his professional manner. "Has the use of her arms partially, as most invalids do. The idea is: you must let your body and chest carry part of the weight, after