With such a basis a firm friendship was very soon established between Lydia and Matron, who led her guest from room to room expressing her own admiration so ungrudgingly that Lydia found it quite unnecessary to say anything. When the Priory was taken over the basement was dismantled and used for furnaces that supplied the central heating and baths, or made into store-rooms. The top story had also been closed and the best bedroom furniture stored there, so that the hospital proper was housed on the ground and first floors. On the first floor, in the bedrooms on two sides of the central hall, the nurses slept and had their sitting-room, the other two sides being given to patients who required special care. On the ground floor a new kitchen and offices had been made in a suite of built-out ro
