The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were tears in her eyes.

Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.

First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in the elevator—he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using a cane—ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.

But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new angle.

The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the Sentinel, and was as unhappy as an interne can be.

"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.

Twenty-two smiled.

"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."

But he was not smiling when he went in.

An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise, accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the Staff room.

To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one, it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.

He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him for weeks, offered him a cigar.

He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the ward and write the order for the operation himself.

Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.

Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform, without a cap.

"How is he?"

The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all, work was a solace for many troubles.

"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow, looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the operating-room and help to clear away."

She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation. Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph, which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her. If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died, she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She, like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.

They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must go.

It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.

The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the twelve o'clock medicines.

"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."

"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.

"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"

There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be sentimentally interested in a patient.

"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me my cane?"

He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a person who intends to take no chances.

"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And—will you send the night watchman here?"

The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her message.

Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of order, the quiet of the night.

Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she go and get it?

"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."

However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the doorway and say a mute little farewell.

Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying footsteps.

He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying, agonisingly, to remember it.

There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.

"The watchman says I have left something here."

It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in her voice.

"You did," he said. And tried to smile.

"Then—if I may have it——"

"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I don't want it. It's darned miserable."

"It's—what?"

"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look: "No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man across who's always listening."

She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly, looking rather pale.

"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going away? Because I've got to know."

"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's—it's perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if the nurses took to—took to doing what I did."

Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against the door.

"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached the limit."

A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became extremely irregular.

"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in love with you that it hurts."

Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love and work, and love came first.

She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.

"I love you, too—so much that it hurts."

The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across, the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too, the thump of a falling cane.

Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but with open eyes.

At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers still on Johnny's thin wrist.

She did not report it.



JANE

I

Having retired to a hospital to sulk, Jane remained there. The family came and sat by her bed uncomfortably and smoked, and finally retreated with defeat written large all over it, leaving Jane to the continued possession of Room 33, a pink kimono with slippers to match, a hand-embroidered face pillow with a rose-coloured bow on the corner, and a young nurse with a gift of giving Jane daily the appearance of a strawberry and vanilla ice rising from a meringue of bed linen.

Jane's complaint was temper. The family knew this, and so did Jane, although she had an annoying way of looking hurt, a gentle heart-brokenness of speech that made the family, under the pretence of getting a match, go out into the hall and swear softly under its breath. But it was temper, and the family was not deceived. Also, knowing Jane, the family was quite ready to believe that while it was swearing in the hall, Jane was biting holes in the hand-embroidered face pillow in Room 33.

It had finally come to be a test of endurance. Jane vowed to stay at the hospital until the family on bended knee begged her to emerge and to brighten the world again with her presence. The family, being her father, said it would be damned if it would, and that if Jane cared to live on anaemic chicken broth, oatmeal wafers and massage twice a day for the rest of her life, why, let her.

The dispute, having begun about whether Jane should or should not marry a certain person, Jane representing the affirmative and her father the negative, had taken on new aspects, had grown and altered, and had, to be brief, become a contest between the masculine Johnson and the feminine Johnson as to which would take the count. Not that this appeared on the surface. The masculine Johnson, having closed the summer home on Jane's defection and gone back to the city, sent daily telegrams, novels and hothouse grapes, all three of which Jane devoured indiscriminately. Once, indeed, Father Johnson had motored the forty miles from town, to be told that Jane was too ill and unhappy to see him, and to have a glimpse, as he drove furiously away, of Jane sitting pensive at her window in the pink kimono, gazing over his head at the distant hills and clearly entirely indifferent to him and his wrath.

So we find Jane, on a frosty morning in late October, in triumphant possession of the field—aunts and cousins routed, her father sulking in town, and the victor herself—or is victor feminine?—and if it isn't, shouldn't it be?—sitting up in bed staring blankly at her watch.

Jane had just wakened—an hour later than usual; she had rung the bell three times and no one had responded. Jane's famous temper began to stretch and yawn. At this hour Jane was accustomed to be washed with tepid water, scented daintily with violet, alcohol-rubbed, talcum-powdered, and finally fresh-linened, coifed and manicured, to be supported with a heap of fresh pillows and fed creamed sweet-bread and golden-brown coffee and toast.

Jane rang again, with a line between her eyebrows. The bell was not broken. She could hear it distinctly. This was an outrage! She would report it to the superintendent. She had been ringing for ten minutes. That little minx of a nurse was flirting somewhere with one of the internes.

Jane angrily flung the covers back and got out on her small bare feet. Then she stretched her slim young arms above her head, her spoiled red mouth forming a scarlet O as she yawned. In her sleeveless and neckless nightgown, with her hair over her shoulders, minus the more elaborate coiffure which later in the day helped her to poise and firmness, she looked a pretty young girl, almost—although Jane herself never suspected this—almost an amiable young person.

Jane saw herself in the glass and assumed immediately the two lines between her eyebrows which were the outward and visible token of what she had suffered. Then she found her slippers, a pair of stockings to match and two round bits of pink silk elastic of private and feminine use, and sat down on the floor to put them on.

The floor was cold. To Jane's wrath was added indignation. She hitched herself along the boards to the radiator and put her hand on it. It was even colder than Jane.

The family temper was fully awake by this time and ready for business. Jane, sitting on the icy floor, jerked on her stockings, snapped the pink bands into place, thrust her feet into her slippers and rose, shivering. She went to the bed, and by dint of careful manoeuvring so placed the bell between the head of the bed and the wall that during the remainder of her toilet it rang steadily.

The remainder of Jane's toilet was rather casual. She flung on the silk kimono, twisted her hair on top of her head and stuck a pin or two in it, thus achieving a sort of effect a thousand times more bewildering than she had ever managed with a curling iron and twenty seven hair pins, and flinging her door wide stalked into the hall. At least she meant to stalk, but one does not really stamp about much in number-two, heelless, pink-satin mules.

At the first stalk—or stamp—she stopped. Standing uncertainly just outside her door was a strange man, strangely attired. Jane clutched her kimono about her and stared.

"Did—did you—are you ringing?" asked the apparition. It wore a pair of white-duck trousers, much soiled, a coat that bore the words "furnace room" down the front in red letters on a white tape, and a clean and spotless white apron. There was coal dust on its face and streaks of it in its hair, which appeared normally to be red.

"There's something the matter with your bell," said the young man. "It keeps on ringing."

"I intend it to," said Jane coldly.

"You can't make a racket like that round here, you know," he asserted, looking past her into the room.

"I intend to make all the racket I can until I get some attention."

"What have you done—put a book on it?"

"Look here"—Jane added another line to the two between her eyebrows. In the family this was generally a signal for a retreat, but of course the young man could not know this, and, besides, he was red-headed. "Look here," said Jane, "I don't know who you are and I don't care either, but that bell is going to ring until I get my bath and some breakfast. And it's going to ring then unless I stop it."

The young man in the coal dust and the white apron looked at Jane and smiled. Then he walked past her into the room, jerked the bed from the wall and released the bell.

"Now!" he said as the din outside ceased. "I'm too busy to talk just at present, but if you do that again I'll take the bell out of the room altogether. There are other people in the hospital besides yourself."

At that he started out and along the hall, leaving Jane speechless. After he'd gone about a dozen feet he stopped and turned, looking at Jane reflectively.

"Do you know anything about cooking?" he asked.

"I know more about cooking than you do about politeness," she retorted, white with fury, and went into her room and slammed the door. She went directly to the bell and put it behind the bed and set it to ringing again. Then she sat down in a chair and picked up a book. Had the red-haired person opened the door she was perfectly prepared to fling the book at him. She would have thrown a hatchet had she had one.

As a matter of fact, however, he did not come back. The bell rang with a soul-satisfying jangle for about two minutes and then died away, and no amount of poking with a hairpin did any good. It was clear that the bell had been cut off outside!

For fifty-five minutes Jane sat in that chair breakfastless, very casually washed and with the aforesaid Billie Burkeness of hair. Then, hunger gaining over temper, she opened the door and peered out. From somewhere near at hand there came a pungent odor of burning toast. Jane sniffed; then, driven by hunger, she made a short sally down the hall to the parlour where the nurses on duty made their headquarters. It was empty. The dismantled bell register was on the wall, with the bell unscrewed and lying on the mantel beside it, and the odour of burning toast was stronger than ever.

Jane padded softly to the odour, following her small nose. It led her to the pantry, where under ordinary circumstances the patients' trays were prepared by a pantrymaid, the food being shipped there from the kitchen on a lift. Clearly the circumstances were not ordinary. The pantrymaid was not in sight.

Instead, the red-haired person was standing by the window scraping busily at a blackened piece of toast. There was a rank odour of boiling tea in the air.

"Damnation!" said the red-haired person, and flung the toast into a corner where there already lay a small heap of charred breakfast hopes. Then he saw Jane.

"I fixed the bell, didn't I?" he remarked. "I say, since you claim to know so much about cooking, I wish you'd make some toast."

"I didn't say I knew much," snapped Jane, holding her kimono round her. "I said I knew more than you knew about politeness."

The red-haired person smiled again, and then, making a deep bow, with a knife in one hand and a toaster in the other, he said: "Madam, I prithee forgive me for my untoward conduct of an hour since. Say but the word and I replace the bell."

"I won't make any toast," said Jane, looking at the bread with famished eyes.

"Oh, very well," said the red-haired person with a sigh. "On your head be it!"

"But I'll tell you how to do it," conceded Jane, "if you'll explain who you are and what you are doing in that costume and where the nurses are."

The red-haired person sat down on the edge of the table and looked at her.

"I'll make a bargain with you," he said. "There's a convalescent typhoid in a room near yours who swears he'll go down to the village for something to eat in his—er—hospital attire unless he's fed soon. He's dangerous, empty. He's reached the cannibalistic stage. If he should see you in that ravishing pink thing, I—I wouldn't answer for the consequences. I'll tell you everything if you'll make him six large slices of toast and boil him four or five eggs, enough to hold him for a while. The tea's probably ready; it's been boiling for an hour."

Hunger was making Jane human. She gathered up the tail of her kimono, and stepping daintily into the pantry proceeded to spread herself a slice of bread and butter.

"Where is everybody?" she asked, licking some butter off her thumb with a small pink tongue.

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig, And the bosun tight and the midshipmite, And the crew of the captain's gig.

recited the red-haired person.

"You!" said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.

"Even I," said the red-haired person. "I'm the superintendent, the staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the ambulance driver."

Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of asking him what he meant. Anyhow, probably she had already guessed. Jane was no fool.

"I hope you're getting the salary list," she said, sitting on the pantry girl's chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to quarrel with, feeling more like herself. "My father's one of the directors, and somebody gets it."

The red-haired person sat on the radiator and eyed Jane. He looked slightly stunned, as if the presence of beauty in a Billie Burke chignon and little else except a kimono was almost too much for him. From somewhere near by came a terrific thumping, as of some one pounding a hairbrush on a table. The red-haired person shifted along the radiator a little nearer Jane, and continued to gloat.

"Don't let that noise bother you," he said; "that's only the convalescent typhoid banging for his breakfast. He's been shouting for food ever since I came at six last night."

"Is it safe to feed him so much?"

"I don't know. He hasn't had anything yet. Perhaps if you're ready you'd better fix him something."

Jane had finished her bread and tea by this time and remembered her kimono.

"I'll go back and dress," she said primly. But he wouldn't hear of it.

"He's starving," he objected as a fresh volley of thumps came along the hall. "I've been trying at intervals since daylight to make him a piece of toast. The minute I put it on the fire I think of something I've forgotten, and when I come back it's in flames."

So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired person told his story.

"You see," he explained, "although I appear to be a furnace man from the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new superintendent."

"I hope you'll do better than the last one," she said severely. "He was always flirting with the nurses."

"I shall never flirt with the nurses," he promised, looking at her. "Anyhow I shan't have any immediate chance. The other fellow left last night and took with him everything portable except the ambulance—nurses, staff, cooks. I wish to Heaven he'd taken the patients! And he did more than that. He cut the telephone wires!"

"Well!" said Jane. "Are you going to stand for it?"

The red-haired man threw up his hands. "The village is with him," he declared. "It's a factional fight—the village against the fashionable summer colony on the hill. I cannot telephone from the village—the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning—look here." He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read:

I will not supply the Valley Hospital with any fresh meats, canned oysters and sausages, or do any plumbing for the hospital until the reinstatement of Dr. Sheets. T. CASHDOLLAR, Butcher.

Jane took the paper and read it again. "Humph!" she commented. "Old Sheets wrote it himself. Mr. Cashdollar couldn't think 'reinstatement,' let alone spell it."

"The question is not who wrote it, but what we are to do," said the red-haired person. "Shall I let old Sheets come back?"

"If you do," said Jane fiercely, "I shall hate you the rest of my life."

And as it was clear by this time that the red-haired person could imagine nothing more horrible, it was settled then and there that he should stay.

"There are only two wards," he said. "In the men's a man named Higgins is able to be up and is keeping things straight. And in the woman's ward Mary O'Shaughnessy is looking after them. The furnaces are the worst. I'd have forgiven almost anything else. I've sat up all night nursing the fires, but they breathed their last at six this morning and I guess there's nothing left but to call the coroner."

Jane had achieved a tolerable plate of toast by that time and four eggs. Also she had a fine flush, a combination of heat from the gas stove and temper.

"They ought to be ashamed," she cried angrily, "leaving a lot of sick people!"

"Oh, as to that," said the red-headed person, "there aren't any very sick ones. Two or three neurasthenics like yourself and a convalescent typhoid and a D.T. in a private room. If it wasn't that Mary O'Shaughnessy——"

But at the word "neurasthenics" Jane had put down the toaster, and by the time the unconscious young man had reached the O'Shaughnessy she was going out the door with her chin up. He called after her, and finding she did not turn he followed her, shouting apologies at her back until she went into her room. And as hospital doors don't lock from the inside she pushed the washstand against the knob and went to bed to keep warm.

He stood outside and apologised again, and later he brought a tray of bread and butter and a pot of the tea, which had been boiling for two hours by that time, and put it outside the door on the floor. But Jane refused to get it, and finished her breakfast from a jar of candied ginger that some one had sent her, and read "Lorna Doone."

Now and then a sound of terrific hammering would follow the steampipes and Jane would smile wickedly. By noon she had finished the ginger and was wondering what the person about whom she and the family had disagreed would think when he heard the way she was being treated. And by one o'clock she had cried her eyes entirely shut and had pushed the washstand back from the door.

II

Now a hospital full of nurses and doctors with a bell to summon food and attention is one thing. A hospital without nurses and doctors, and with only one person to do everything, and that person mostly in the cellar, is quite another. Jane was very sad and lonely, and to add to her troubles the delirium-tremens case down the hall began to sing "Oh Promise Me" in a falsetto voice and kept it up for hours.

At three Jane got up and bathed her eyes. She also did her hair, and thus fortified she started out to find the red-haired person. She intended to say that she was paying sixty-five dollars a week and belonged to a leading family, and that she didn't mean to endure for a moment the treatment she was getting, and being called a neurasthenic and made to cook for the other patients.

She went slowly along the hall. The convalescent typhoid heard her and called.

"Hey, doc!" he cried. "Hey, doc! Great Scott, man, when do I get some dinner?"

Jane quickened her steps and made for the pantry. From somewhere beyond, the delirium-tremens case was singing happily:

I—love you o—own—ly, I love—but—you.

Jane shivered a little. The person in whom she had been interested and who had caused her precipitate retirement, if not to a nunnery, to what answered the same purpose, had been very fond of that song. He used to sing it, leaning over the piano and looking into her eyes.

Jane's nose led her again to the pantry. There was a sort of soupy odour in the air, and sure enough the red-haired person was there, very immaculate in fresh ducks, pouring boiling water into three tea-cups out of a kettle and then dropping a beef capsule into each cup.

Now Jane had intended, as I have said, to say that she was being outrageously treated, and belonged to one of the best families, and so on. What she really said was piteously:

"How good it smells!"

"Doesn't it!" said the red-haired person, sniffing. "Beef capsules. I've made thirty cups of it so far since one o'clock—the more they have the more they want. I say, be a good girl and run up to the kitchen for some more crackers while I carry food to the convalescent typhoid. He's murderous!"

"Where are the crackers?" asked Jane stiffly, but not exactly caring to raise an issue until she was sure of getting something to eat.

"Store closet in the kitchen, third drawer on the left," said the red-haired man, shaking some cayenne pepper into one of the cups. "You might stop that howling lunatic on your way if you will."

"How?" asked Jane, pausing.

"Ram a towel down his throat, or—but don't bother. I'll dose him with this beef tea and red pepper, and he'll be too busy putting out the fire to want to sing."

"You wouldn't be so cruel!" said Jane, rather drawing back. The red-haired person smiled and to Jane it showed that he was actually ferocious. She ran all the way up for the crackers and down again, carrying the tin box. There is no doubt that Jane's family would have promptly swooned had it seen her.

When she came down there was a sort of after-dinner peace reigning. The convalescent typhoid, having filled up on milk and beef soup, had floated off to sleep. "The Chocolate Soldier" had given way to deep-muttered imprecations from the singer's room. Jane made herself a cup of bouillon and drank it scalding. She was making the second when the red-haired person came back with an empty cup.

"I forgot to explain," he said, "that beef tea and red pepper's the treatment for our young friend in there. After a man has been burning his stomach daily with a quart or so of raw booze——"

"I beg your pardon," said Jane coolly. Booze was not considered good form on the hill—the word, of course. There was plenty of the substance.

"Raw booze," repeated the red-haired person. "Nothing short of red pepper or dynamite is going to act as a substitute. Why, I'll bet the inside of that chap's stomach is of the general sensitiveness and consistency of my shoe."

"Indeed!" said Jane, coldly polite. In Jane's circle people did not discuss the interiors of other people's stomachs. The red-haired person sat on the table with a cup of bouillon in one hand and a cracker in the other.

"You know," he said genially, "it's awfully bully of you to come out and keep me company like this. I never put in such a day. I've given up fussing with the furnace and got out extra blankets instead. And I think by night our troubles will be over." He held up the cup and glanced at Jane, who was looking entrancingly pretty. "To our troubles being over!" he said, draining the cup, and then found that he had used the red pepper again by mistake. It took five minutes and four cups of cold water to enable him to explain what he meant.

"By our troubles being over," he said finally when he could speak, "I mean this: There's a train from town at eight to-night, and if all goes well it will deposit in the village half a dozen nurses, a cook or two, a furnace man—good Heavens, I wonder if I forgot a furnace man!"

It seemed, as Jane discovered, that the telephone wires being cut, he had sent Higgins from the men's ward to the village to send some telegrams for him.

"I couldn't leave, you see," he explained, "and having some small reason to believe that I am persona non grata in this vicinity I sent Higgins."

Jane had always hated the name Higgins. She said afterward that she felt uneasy from that moment. The red-haired person, who was not bad-looking, being tall and straight and having a very decent nose, looked at Jane, and Jane, having been shut away for weeks—Jane preened a little and was glad she had done her hair.

"You looked better the other way," said the red-haired person, reading her mind in a most uncanny manner. "Why should a girl with as pretty hair as yours cover it up with a net, anyhow?"

"You are very disagreeable and—and impertinent," said Jane, sliding off the table.

"It isn't disagreeable to tell a girl she has pretty hair," the red-haired person protested—"or impertinent either."

Jane was gathering up the remnants of her temper, scattered by the events of the day.

"You said I was a neurasthenic," she accused him. "It—it isn't being a neurasthenic to be nervous and upset and hating the very sight of people, is it?"

"Bless my soul!" said the red-haired man. "Then what is it?" Jane flushed, but he went on tactlessly: "I give you my word, I think you are the most perfectly"—he gave every appearance of being about to say "beautiful," but he evidently changed his mind—"the most perfectly healthy person I have ever looked at," he finished.

It is difficult to say just what Jane would have done under other circumstances, but just as she was getting her temper really in hand and preparing to launch something, shuffling footsteps were heard in the hall and Higgins stood in the doorway.

He was in a sad state. One of his eyes was entirely closed, and the corresponding ear stood out large and bulbous from his head. Also he was coated with mud, and he was carefully nursing one hand with the other.

He said he had been met at the near end of the railroad bridge by the ex-furnace man and one of the ex-orderlies and sent back firmly, having in fact been kicked back part of the way. He'd been told to report at the hospital that the tradespeople had instituted a boycott, and that either the former superintendent went back or the entire place could starve to death.

It was then that Jane discovered that her much-vaunted temper was not one-two-three to that of the red-haired person. He turned a sort of blue-white, shoved Jane out of his way as if she had been a chair, and she heard him clatter down the stairs and slam out of the front door.

Jane went back to her room and looked down the drive. He was running toward the bridge, and the sunlight on his red hair and his flying legs made him look like a revengeful meteor. Jane was weak in the knees. She knelt on the cold radiator and watched him out of sight, and then got trembly all over and fell to snivelling. This was of course because, if anything happened to him, she would be left entirely alone. And anyhow the D.T. case was singing again and had rather got on her nerves.

In ten minutes the red-haired person appeared. He had a wretched-looking creature by the back of the neck and he alternately pushed and kicked him up the drive. He—the red-haired person—was whistling and clearly immensely pleased with himself.

Jane put a little powder on her nose and waited for him to come and tell her all about it. But he did not come near. This was quite the cleverest thing he could have done, had he known it. Jane was not accustomed to waiting in vain. He must have gone directly to the cellar, half pushing and half kicking the luckless furnace man, for about four o'clock the radiator began to get warm.

At five he came and knocked at Jane's door, and on being invited in he sat down on the bed and looked at her.

"Well, we've got the furnace going," he said.

"Then that was the——"

"Furnace man? Yes."

"Aren't you afraid to leave him?" queried Jane. "Won't he run off?"

"Got him locked in a padded cell," he said. "I can take him out to coal up. The rest of the time he can sit and think of his sins. The question is—what are we to do next?"

"I should think," ventured Jane, "that we'd better be thinking about supper."

"The beef capsules are gone."

"But surely there must be something else about—potatoes or things like that?"

He brightened perceptibly. "Oh, yes, carloads of potatoes, and there's canned stuff. Higgins can pare potatoes, and there's Mary O'Shaughnessy. We could have potatoes and canned tomatoes and eggs."

"Fine!" said Jane with her eyes gleaming, although the day before she would have said they were her three abominations.

And with that he called Higgins and Mary O'Shaughnessy and the four of them went to the kitchen.

Jane positively shone. She had never realised before how much she knew about cooking. They built a fire and got kettles boiling and everybody pared potatoes, and although in excess of zeal the eggs were ready long before everything else and the tomatoes scorched slightly, still they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in ability, and when Higgins had carried the trays to the lift and started them on their way, Jane and the red-haired person shook hands on it and then ate a boiled potato from the same plate, sitting side by side on a table.

They were ravenous. They boiled one egg each and ate it, and then boiled another and another, and when they finished they found that Jane had eaten four potatoes, four eggs and unlimited bread and butter, while the red-haired person had eaten six saucers of stewed tomatoes and was starting on the seventh.

"You know," he said over the seventh, "we've got to figure this thing out. The entire town is solid against us—no use trying to get to a telephone. And anyhow they've got us surrounded. We're in a state of siege."

Jane was beating up an egg in milk for the D.T. patient, the capsules being exhausted, and the red-haired person was watching her closely. She had the two vertical lines between her eyes, but they looked really like lines of endeavour and not temper.

She stopped beating and looked up.

"Couldn't I go to the village?" she asked.

"They would stop you."

"Then—I think I know what we can do," she said, giving the eggnog a final whisk. "My people have a summer place on the hill. If you could get there you could telephone to the city."

"Could I get in?"

"I have a key."

Jane did not explain that the said key had been left by her father, with the terse hope that if she came to her senses she could get into the house and get her clothes.

"Good girl," said the red-headed person and patted her on the shoulder. "We'll euchre the old skate yet." Curiously, Jane did not resent either the speech or the pat.

He took the glass and tied on a white apron. "If our friend doesn't drink this, I will," he continued. "If he'd seen it in the making, as I have, he'd be crazy about it."

He opened the door and stood listening. From below floated up the refrain:

I—love you o—own—ly, I love—but—you.

"Listen to that!" he said. "Stomach's gone, but still has a heart!"

Higgins came up the stairs heavily and stopped close by the red-haired person, whispering something to him. There was a second's pause. Then the red-haired person gave the eggnog to Higgins and both disappeared.

Jane was puzzled. She rather thought the furnace man had got out and listened for a scuffle, but none came. She did, however, hear the singing cease below, and then commence with renewed vigour, and she heard Higgins slowly remounting the stairs. He came in, with the empty glass and a sheepish expression. Part of the eggnog was distributed over his person.

"He wants his nurse, ma'am," said Higgins. "Wouldn't let me near him. Flung a pillow at me."

"Where is the doctor?" demanded Jane.

"Busy," replied Higgins. "One of the women is sick."

Jane was provoked. She had put some labour into the eggnog. But it shows the curious evolution going on in her that she got out the eggs and milk and made another one without protest. Then with her head up she carried it to the door.

"You might clear things away, Higgins," she said, and went down the stairs. Her heart was going rather fast. Most of the men Jane knew drank more or less, but this was different. She would have turned back halfway there had it not been for Higgins and for owning herself conquered. That was Jane's real weakness—she never owned herself beaten.

The singing had subsided to a low muttering. Jane stopped outside the door and took a fresh grip on her courage. Then she pushed the door open and went in.

The light was shaded, and at first the tossing figure on the bed was only a misty outline of greys and whites. She walked over, expecting a pillow at any moment and shielding the glass from attack with her hand.

"I have brought you another eggnog," she began severely, "and if you spill it——"

Then she looked down and saw the face on the pillow.

To her everlasting credit, Jane did not faint. But in that moment, while she stood staring down at the flushed young face with its tumbled dark hair and deep-cut lines of dissipation, the man who had sung to her over the piano, looking love into her eyes, died to her, and Jane, cold and steady, sat down on the side of the bed and fed the eggnog, spoonful by spoonful, to his corpse!

When the blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk from green to grey, from grey to black. And over the transom came again and again monotonously the refrain:

I—love you o—own—ly, I love—but—you.

Jane fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her wilful head in the hand-embroidered pillow, and said a little prayer because she had found out in time.

III

The full realisation of their predicament came with the dusk. The electric lights were shut off! Jane, crawling into bed tearfully at half after eight, turned the reading light switch over her head, but no flood of rosy radiance poured down on the hand-embroidered pillow with the pink bow.

Jane sat up and stared round her. Already the outline of her dresser was faint and shadowy. In half an hour black night would settle down and she had not even a candle or a box of matches. She crawled out, panicky, and began in the darkness to don her kimono and slippers. As she opened the door and stepped into the hall the convalescent typhoid heard her and set up his usual cry.

"Hey," he called, "whoever that is come in and fix the lights. They're broken. And I want some bread and milk. I can't sleep on an empty stomach!"

Jane padded on past the room where love lay cold and dead, down the corridor with its alarming echoes. The house seemed very quiet. At a corner unexpectedly she collided with some one going hastily. The result was a crash and a deluge of hot water. Jane got a drop on her bare ankle, and as soon as she could breathe she screamed.

"Why don't you look where you're going?" demanded the red-haired person angrily. "I've been an hour boiling that water, and now it has to be done over again!"

"It would do a lot of good to look!" retorted Jane. "But if you wish I'll carry a bell!"

"The thing for you to do," said the red-haired person severely, "is to go back to bed like a good girl and stay there until morning. The light is cut off."

"Really!" said Jane. "I thought it had just gone out for a walk. I daresay I may have a box of matches at least?"

He fumbled in his pockets without success.

"Not a match, of course!" he said disgustedly. "Was any one ever in such an infernal mess? Can't you get back to your room without matches?"

"I shan't go back at all unless I have some sort of light," maintained Jane. "I'm—horribly frightened!"

The break in her voice caught his attention and he put his hand out gently and took her arm.

"Now listen," he said. "You've been brave and fine all day, and don't stop it now. I—I've got all I can manage. Mary O'Shaughnessy is——" He stopped. "I'm going to be very busy," he said with half a groan. "I surely do wish you were forty for the next few hours. But you'll go back and stay in your room, won't you?"

He patted her arm, which Jane particularly hated generally. But Jane had altered considerably since morning.

"Then you cannot go to the telephone?"

"Not to-night."

"And Higgins?"

"Higgins has gone," he said. "He slipped off an hour ago. We'll have to manage to-night somehow. Now will you be a good child?"

"I'll go back," she promised meekly. "I'm sorry I'm not forty."

He turned her round and started her in the right direction with a little push. But she had gone only a step or two when she heard him coming after her quickly.

"Where are you?"

"Here," quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.

But when he stopped beside her he didn't try to touch her arm again. He only said:

"I wouldn't have you forty for anything in the world. I want you to be just as you are, very beautiful and young."

Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the darkness and awoke a thousand echoes. As for Jane, she put her fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.

Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five seconds when somebody in the room spoke—from a chair by the window.

"Do you think," said a mild voice—"do you think you could find me some bread and butter? Or a glass of milk?"

Jane sat up in bed suddenly. She knew at once that she had made a mistake, but she was quite dignified about it. She looked over at the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.

"I'm afraid I'm in the wrong room," Jane said very stiffly, trying to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult. "The hall is dark and all the doors look so alike——"

She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her heart going a thousand a minute again.

"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.

The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made him at college—things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.

Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and "beautiful." It must be confessed that she thought a great deal about that. Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her at times and generally keep her straight. And from that, of course, it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are proverbially bad-tempered!

She thought, too, about Mary O'Shaughnessy without another woman near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle. Things were always so much worse in the darkness. And perhaps she might be going to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!

Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church clock far down in the village struck nine. And with the chiming of the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty seconds of age was a determination.

In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a motor veil over her hair. The indignation at the defection of the hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her movements. In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.

The front doors were unlocked. Outside there was faint starlight, the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the village.

Jane paused at the drive and took a breath. Then at her best gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she started to run. At the sundial she left the drive and took to the lawn gleaming with the frost of late October. She stopped running then and began to pick her way more cautiously. Even at that she collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and feeling her nose. It was distinctly scratched and swollen. No one would think her beautiful with a nose like that!

She had not expected the wire fence. It was impossible to climb and more difficult to get under. However, she found one place where the ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most undignified fashion. It is perfectly certain that had Jane's family seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her spoiled young life.

Jane never told the details of that excursion. Those that came out in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences, and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate. But as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow——

Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a thief to the telephone. There were more rustlings and creakings and rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after her. But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called up her father in the city.

The first message that astonished gentleman got was that a red-haired person at the hospital was very ill, having run into a wire fence and bruised a nose, and that he was to bring out at once from town two doctors, six nurses, a cook and a furnace man!

After a time, however, as Jane grew calmer, he got it straightened out, and said a number of things over the telephone anent the deserting staff that are quite forbidden by the rules both of the club and of the telephone company. He gave Jane full instructions about sending to the village and having somebody come up and stay with her, and about taking a hot footbath and going to bed between blankets, and when Jane replied meekly to everything "Yes, father," and "All right, father," he was so stunned by her mildness that he was certain she must be really ill.

Not that Jane had any idea of doing all these things. She hung up the telephone and gathered all the candles from all the candlesticks on the lower floor, and started back for the hospital. The moon had come up and she had no more trouble with fencing, but she was desperately tired. She climbed the drive slowly, coming to frequent pauses. The hospital, long and low and sleeping, lay before her, and in one upper window there was a small yellow light.

Jane climbed the steps and sat down on the top one. She felt very tired and sad and dejected, and she sat down on the upper step to think of how useless she was, and how much a man must know to be a doctor, and that perhaps she would take up nursing in earnest and amount to something, and——

It was about three o'clock in the morning when the red-haired person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap moved slightly and muttered "Lemme shleep."

The red-haired person said "Good Heavens!" and bending down held a lighted match to the sleeper's face and stared, petrified. Jane opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose with one gesture.

"You!" said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match went out.

"Don't light another," said Jane. "I'm an alarming sight. Would—would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?"

He didn't move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"Over to telephone," said Jane, and yawned. "They're bringing everybody in automobiles—doctors, nurses, furnace man—oh, dear me, I hope I mentioned a cook!"

"Do you mean to say," said the red-haired person wonderingly, "that you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out of this mess?"

"Not at all," Jane corrected him coolly. "I'm in the mess myself."

"You'll be ill again."

"I never was ill," said Jane. "I was here for a mean disposition."

Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her hands.

"You're a heroine," he said, and bending down he kissed first one and then the other. "Isn't it bad enough that you are beautiful without your also being brave?"

Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps——

"Am I still beautiful with this nose?" she asked.

"You are everything that a woman should be," he said, and dropping her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her long lashes.

"Then why don't you stay where you were?" she asked.

At that he reached down and took her hands again and pulled her to her feet. He was very strong.

"Because if I do I'll never leave you again," he said. "And I must go."

He dropped her hands, or tried to, but Jane wasn't ready to be dropped.

"You know," she said, "I've told you I'm a sulky, bad-tempered——"

But at that he laughed suddenly, triumphantly, and put both his arms round her and held her close.

"I love you," he said, "and if you are bad-tempered, so am I, only I think I'm worse. It's a shame to spoil two houses with us, isn't it?"

To her eternal shame be it told, Jane never struggled. She simply held up her mouth to be kissed.

That is really all the story. Jane's father came with three automobiles that morning at dawn, bringing with him all that goes to make up a hospital, from a pharmacy clerk to absorbent cotton, and having left the new supplies in the office he stamped upstairs to Jane's room and flung open the door.

He expected to find Jane in hysterics and the pink silk kimono.

What he really saw was this: A coal fire was lighted in Jane's grate, and in a low chair before it, with her nose swollen level with her forehead, sat Jane, holding on her lap Mary O'Shaughnessy's baby, very new and magenta-coloured and yelling like a trooper. Kneeling beside the chair was a tall, red-headed person holding a bottle of olive oil.

"Now, sweetest," the red-haired person was saying, "turn him on his tummy and we'll rub his back. Gee, isn't that a fat back!"

And as Jane's father stared and Jane anxiously turned the baby, the red-haired person leaned over and kissed the back of Jane's neck.

"Jane!" he whispered.

"Jane!!" said her father.



IN THE PAVILION

I

Now, had Billy Grant really died there would be no story. The story is to relate how he nearly died; and how, approaching that bourne to which no traveller may take with him anything but his sins—and this with Billy Grant meant considerable luggage—he cast about for some way to prevent the Lindley Grants from getting possession of his worldly goods.

Probably it would never have happened at all had not young Grant, having hit on a scheme, clung to it with a tenacity that might better have been devoted to saving his soul, and had he not said to the Nurse, who was at that moment shaking a thermometer: "Come on—be a sport! It's only a matter of hours." Not that he said it aloud—he whispered it, and fought for the breath to do even that. The Nurse, having shaken down the thermometer, walked to the table and recorded a temperature of one hundred and six degrees through a most unprofessional mist of tears. Then in the symptom column she wrote: "Delirious."

But Billy Grant was not delirious. A fever of a hundred and four or thereabout may fuse one's mind in a sort of fiery crucible, but when it gets to a hundred and six all the foreign thoughts, like seeing green monkeys on the footboard and wondering why the doctor is walking on his hands—all these things melt away, and one sees one's past, as when drowning, and remembers to hate one's relations, and is curious about what is coming when one goes over.

So Billy Grant lay on his bed in the contagious pavilion of the hospital, and remembered to hate the Lindley Grants and to try to devise a way to keep them out of his property. And, having studied law, he knew no will that he might make now would hold against the Lindley Grants for a minute, unless he survived its making some thirty days. The Staff Doctor had given him about thirty hours or less.

Perhaps he would have given up in despair and been forced to rest content with a threat to haunt the Lindley Grants and otherwise mar the enjoyment of their good fortune, had not the Nurse at that moment put the thermometer under his arm.

Now, as every one knows, an axillary temperature takes five minutes, during which it is customary for a nurse to kneel beside the bed, or even to sit very lightly on the edge, holding the patient's arm close to his side and counting his respirations while pretending to be thinking of something else. It was during these five minutes that the idea came into Billy Grant's mind and, having come, remained. The Nurse got up, rustling starchily, and Billy caught her eye.

"Every engine," he said with difficulty, "labours—in a low—gear. No wonder I'm—heated up!"

The Nurse, who was young, put her hand on his forehead.

"Try to sleep," she said.

"Time for—that—later," said Billy Grant. "I'll—I'll be a—long time—dead. I—I wonder whether you'd—do me a—favour."

"I'll do anything in the world you want."

She tried to smile down at him, but only succeeded in making her chin quiver, which would never do—being unprofessional and likely to get to the head nurse; so, being obliged to do something, she took his pulse by the throbbing in his neck.

"One, two, three, four, five, six——"

"Then—marry me," gasped Billy Grant. "Only for an—hour or—two, you know. You—promised. Come on—be a sport!"

It was then that the Nurse walked to the table and recorded "Delirious" in the symptom column. And, though she was a Smith College girl and had taken a something or other in mathematics, she spelled it just then with two r's.

Billy Grant was not in love with the Nurse. She was a part of his illness, like the narrow brass bed and the yellow painted walls, and the thermometer under his arm, and the medicines. There were even times—when his fever subsided for a degree or two, after a cold sponge, and the muddled condition of mind returned—when she seemed to have more heads than even a nurse requires. So sentiment did not enter into the matter at all; it was revenge.

"You—promised," he said again; but the Nurse only smiled indulgently and rearranged the bottles on the stand in neat rows.

Jenks, the orderly, carried her supper to the isolation pavilion at six o'clock—cold ham, potato salad, egg custard and tea. Also, he brought her an evening paper. But the Nurse was not hungry. She went into the bathroom, washed her eyes with cold water, put on a clean collar, against the impending visit of the Staff Doctor, and then stood at the window, looking across at the hospital and feeling very lonely and responsible. It was not a great hospital, but it loomed large and terrible that night. The ambulance came out into the courtyard, and an interne, in white ducks, came out to it, carrying a surgical bag. He looked over at her and waved his hand. "Big railroad wreck!" he called cheerfully. "Got 'em coming in bunches." He crawled into the ambulance, where the driver, trained to many internes, gave him time to light a cigarette; then out into the dusk, with the gong beating madly. Billy Grant, who had lapsed into a doze, opened his eyes.

"What—about it?" he asked. "You're not—married already—are you?"

"Please try to rest. Perhaps if I get your beef juice——"

"Oh, damn—the beef juice!" whispered Billy Grant, and shut his eyes again—but not to sleep. He was planning how to get his way, and finally, out of a curious and fantastic medley of thoughts, he evolved something. The doctor, of course! These women had to do what the doctor ordered. He would see the doctor!—upon which, with a precision quite amazing, all the green monkeys on the footboard of the bed put their thumbs to their noses at him.

The situation was unusual; for here was young Grant, far enough from any one who knew he was one of the Van Kleek Grants—and, as such, entitled to all the nurses and doctors that money could procure—shut away in the isolation pavilion of a hospital, and not even putting up a good fight! Even the Nurse felt this, and when the Staff Man came across the courtyard that night she met him on the doorstep and told him.

"He doesn't care whether he gets well or not," she said dispiritedly. "All he seems to think about is to die and to leave everything he owns so his relatives won't get it. It's horrible!"

The Staff Man, who had finished up a hard day with a hospital supper of steak and fried potatoes, sat down on the doorstep and fished out a digestive tablet from his surgical bag.

"It's pretty sad, little girl," he said, over the pill. He had known the Nurse for some time, having, in fact, brought her—according to report at the time—in a predecessor of the very bag at his feet, and he had the fatherly manner that belongs by right to the man who has first thumped one between the shoulder-blades to make one breathe, and who had remarked on this occasion to some one beyond the door: "A girl, and fat as butter!"

The Nurse tiptoed in and found Billy Grant apparently asleep. Actually he had only closed his eyes, hoping to lure one of the monkeys within clutching distance. So the Nurse came out again, with the symptom record.

"Delirious, with two r's," said the Staff Doctor, glancing over his spectacles. "He must have been pretty bad."

"Not wild; he—he wanted me to marry him!"

She smiled, showing a most alluring dimple in one cheek.

"I see! Well, that's not necessarily delirium. H'm—pulse, respiration—look at that temperature! Yes, it's pretty sad—away from home, too, poor lad!"

"You—— Isn't there any hope, doctor?"

"None at all—at least, I've never had 'em get well."

Now the Nurse should, by all the ethics of hospital practice, have walked behind the Staff Doctor, listening reverentially to what he said, not speaking until she was spoken to, and carrying in one hand an order blank on which said august personage would presently inscribe certain cabalistic characters, to be deciphered later by the pharmacy clerk with a strong light and much blasphemy, and in the other hand a clean towel. The clean towel does not enter into the story, but for the curious be it said that were said personage to desire to listen to the patient's heart, the towel would be unfolded and spread, without creases, over the patient's chest—which reminds me of the Irishman and the weary practitioner; but every one knows that story.

Now that is what the Nurse should have done; instead of which, in the darkened passageway, being very tired and exhausted and under a hideous strain, she suddenly slipped her arm through the Staff Doctor's and, putting her head on his shoulder, began to cry softly.

"What's this?" demanded the Staff Doctor sternly and, putting his arm round her: "Don't you know that Junior Nurses are not supposed to weep over the Staff?" And, getting no answer but a choke: "We can't have you used up like this; I'll make them relieve you. When did you sleep?"

"I don't want to be relieved," said the Nurse, very muffled. "No-nobody else would know wh-what he wanted. I just—I just can't bear to see him—to see him——"

The Staff Doctor picked up the clean towel, which belonged on the Nurse's left arm, and dried her eyes for her; then he sighed.

"None of us likes to see it, girl," he said. "I'm an old man, and I've never got used to it. What do they send you to eat?"

"The food's all right," she said rather drearily. "I'm not hungry—that's all. How long do you think——"

The Staff Doctor, who was putting an antiseptic gauze cap over his white hair, ran a safety pin into his scalp at that moment and did not reply at once. Then, "Perhaps—until morning," he said.

He held out his arms for the long, white, sterilised coat, and a moment later, with his face clean-washed of emotion, and looking like a benevolent Turk, he entered the sick room. The Nurse was just behind him, with an order book in one hand and a clean towel over her arm.

Billy Grant, from his bed, gave the turban a high sign of greeting.

"Allah—is—great!" he gasped cheerfully. "Well, doctor—I guess it's all—over but—the shouting."

II

Some time after midnight Billy Grant roused out of a stupor. He was quite rational; in fact, he thought he would get out of bed. But his feet would not move. This was absurd! One's feet must move if one wills them to! However, he could not stir either of them. Otherwise he was beautifully comfortable.

Faint as was the stir he made the Nurse heard him. She was sitting in the dark by the window.

"Water?" she asked softly, coming to him.

"Please." His voice was stronger than it had been.

Some of the water went down his neck, but it did not matter. Nothing mattered except the Lindley Grants. The Nurse took his temperature and went out into the hall to read the thermometer, so he might not watch her face. Then, having recorded it under the nightlight, she came back into the room.

"Why don't you put on something comfortable?" demanded Billy Grant querulously. He was so comfortable himself and she was so stiffly starched, so relentless of collar and cap.

"I am comfortable."

"Where's that wrapper thing you've been wearing at night?" The Nurse rather flushed at this. "Why don't you lie down on the cot and take a nap? I don't need anything."

"Not—not to-night."

He understood, of course, but he refused to be depressed. He was too comfortable. He was breathing easily, and his voice, though weak, was clear.

"Would you mind sitting beside me? Or are you tired? But of course you are. Perhaps in a night or so you'll be over there again, sleeping in a nice white gown in a nice fresh bed, with no querulous devil——"

"Please!"

"You'll have to be sterilised or formaldehyded?"

"Yes." This very low.

"Will you put your hand over mine? Thanks. It's—company, you know." He was apologetic; under her hand his own burned fire. "I—I spoke to the Staff about that while you were out of the room."

"About what?"

"About your marrying me."

"What did he say?" She humoured him.

"He said he was willing if you were. You're not going to move—are you?"

"No. But you must not talk."

"It's like this. I've got a little property—not much; a little." He was nervously eager about this. If she knew it amounted to anything she would refuse, and the Lindley Grants—— "And when I—you know—— I want to leave it where it will do some good. That little brother of yours—it would send him through college, or help to."

Once, weeks ago, before he became so ill, she had told him of the brother. This in itself was wrong and against the ethics of the profession. One does not speak of oneself or one's family.

"If you won't try to sleep, shall I read to you?"

"Read what?"

"I thought—the Bible, if you wouldn't mind."

"Certainly," he agreed. "I suppose that's the conventional thing; and if it makes you feel any better—— Will you think over what I've been saying?"

"I'll think about it," she said, soothing him like a fretful child, and brought her Bible.

The clock on the near-by town hall struck two as she drew up her chair beside him and commenced to read by the shaded light. Across the courtyard the windows were dim yellowish rectangles, with here and there one brighter than the others that told its own story of sleepless hours. A taxicab rolled along the street outside, carrying a boisterous night party.

The Nurse had taken off her cap and put it on a stand. The autumn night was warm, and the light touch of the tulle had pressed her hair in damp, fine curves over her forehead. There were purple hollows of anxiety and sleeplessness under her eyes.

"The perfect nurse," the head of the training school was fond of saying, "is more or less of a machine. Too much sympathy is a handicap to her work and an embarrassment to her patient. A perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine!"

Poor Junior Nurse!

Now Billy Grant, lying there listening to something out of Isaiah, should have been repenting his hard-living, hard-drinking young life; should have been forgiving the Lindley Grants—which story does not belong here; should have been asking for the consolation of the church, and trying to summon from the depths of his consciousness faint memories of early teachings as to the life beyond, and what he might or might not expect there.

What he actually did while the Nurse read was to try to move his legs, and, failing this, to plan a way to achieve the final revenge of a not particularly forgiving life.

At a little before three o'clock the Nurse telephoned across for an interne, who came over in a bathrobe over his pajamas and shot a hypodermic into Billy Grant's left arm. Billy Grant hardly noticed. He was seeing Mrs. Lindley Grant when his surprise was sprung on her. The interne summoned the Nurse into the hall with a jerk of his head.

"About all in!" he said. "Heart's gone—too much booze probably. I'd stay, but there's nothing to do."

"Would oxygen——"

"Oh, you can try it if you like. It's like blowing up a leaking tire; but if you'll feel better, do it." He yawned and tied the cord of his bathrobe round him more securely. "I guess you'll be glad to get back," he observed, looking round the dingy hall. "This place always gives me a chill. Well, let me know if you want me. Good night."

The Nurse stood in the hallway until the echo of his slippers on the asphalt had died away. Then she turned to Billy Grant.

"Well?" demanded Billy Grant. "How long have I? Until morning?"

"If you would only not talk and excite yourself——"

"Hell!" said Billy Grant, we regret to record. "I've got to do all the talking I'm going to do right now. I beg your pardon—I didn't intend to swear."

"Oh, that's all right!" said the Nurse vaguely. This was like no deathbed she had ever seen, and it was disconcerting.

"Shall I read again?"

"No, thank you."

The Nurse looked at her watch, which had been graduation present from her mother and which said, inside the case: "To my little girl!" There is no question but that, when the Nurse's mother gave that inscription to the jeweller, she was thinking of the day when the Staff Doctor had brought the Nurse in his leather bag, and had slapped her between the shoulders to make her breathe. "To my little girl!" said the watch; and across from that—"Three o'clock."

At half-past three Billy Grant, having matured his plans, remarked that if it would ease the Nurse any he'd see a preacher. His voice was weaker again and broken.

"Not"—he said, struggling—"not that I think—he'll pass me. But—if you say so—I'll—take a chance."

All of which was diabolical cunning; for when, as the result of a telephone conversation, the minister came, an unworldly man who counted the world, an automobile, a vested choir and a silver communion service well lost for the sake of a dozen derelicts in a slum mission house, Billy Grant sent the Nurse out to prepare a broth he could no longer swallow, and proceeded to cajole the man of God. This he did by urging the need of the Nurse's small brother for an education and by forgetting to mention either the Lindley Grants or the extent of his property.

From four o'clock until five Billy Grant coaxed the Nurse with what voice he had. The idea had become an obsession; and minute by minute, panting breath by panting breath, her resolution wore away. He was not delirious; he was as sane as she was and terribly set. And this thing he wanted was so easy to grant; meant so little to her and, for some strange reason, so much to him. Perhaps, if she did it, he would think a little of what the preacher was saying.

At five o'clock, utterly worn out with the struggle and finding his pulse a negligible quantity, in response to his pleading eyes the Nurse, kneeling and holding a thermometer under her patient's arm with one hand, reached the other one over the bed and was married in a dozen words and a soiled white apron.

Dawn was creeping in at the windows—a grey city dawn, filled with soot and the rumbling of early wagons. A smell of damp asphalt from the courtyard floated in and a dirty sparrow chirped on the sill where the Nurse had been in the habit of leaving crumbs. Billy Grant, very sleepy and contented now that he had got his way, dictated a line or two on a blank symptom record, and signed his will in a sprawling hand.

"If only," he muttered, "I could see Lin's face when that's—sprung on him!"

The minister picked up the Bible from the tumbled bed and opened it.

"Perhaps," he suggested very softly, "if I read from the Word of God——"

Satisfied now that he had fooled the Lindley Grants out of their very shoebuttons, Billy Grant was asleep—asleep with the thermometer under his arm and with his chest rising and falling peacefully.

The minister looked across at the Nurse, who was still holding the thermometer in place. She had buried her face in the white counterpane.

"You are a good woman, sister," he said softly. "The boy is happier, and you are none the worse. Shall I keep the paper for you?"

But the Nurse, worn out with the long night, slept where she knelt. The minister, who had come across the street in a ragged smoking-coat and no collar, creaked round the bed and threw the edge of the blanket over her shoulders.

Then, turning his coat collar up over his unshaved neck, he departed for the mission across the street, where one of his derelicts, in his shirtsleeves, was sweeping the pavement. There, mindful of the fact that he had come from the contagious pavilion, the minister brushed his shabby smoking-coat with a whiskbroom to remove the germs!

III

Billy Grant, of course, did not die. This was perhaps because only the good die young. And Billy Grant's creed had been the honour of a gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law. There was, therefore, no particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts—or what appeared to be his last thoughts—were revenge instead of salvation.

The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley Grants. When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink. The Lindley Grants did not understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him "Poor Billy!" and not having wine when he came to dinner. That, however, was not his reason for hating them.

Billy Grant fell in love. To give the devil his due, he promptly set about reforming himself. He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne altogether. He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to warn the girl's family before it was too late.

"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give them to you."

So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented the ring to a cabman—all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather human after all.

The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a hundred and three.

At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.

"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to have been called. I told you——"

"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He—I think he is better."

Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to hunt the symptom record for himself—a thing not to be lightly overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.

The interne looked over the record and whistled.

"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"

So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she remembered. Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant's eyes fixed on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful expression in them. And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.

He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly's assistance, he was lifted to a chair. There was one brief moment in which he stood tottering on his feet. In that instant he had realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel advantage he had used for his own purpose.

When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first personality of their new relationship.

"What a little girl you are, after all!" he said. "Lying there in the bed shaking at your frown, you were so formidable."

"I am not small," she said, straightening herself. She had always hoped that her cap gave her height. "It is you who are so tall. You—you are a giant!"

"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely girls for dinner under pretence of marriage——" He stopped his nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured. Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his convalescence was always pertinent—food. "Speaking of dinner," he said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"

She was quite calm when she came back—cool, even smiling; but Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her hand.

"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too late for anything but forgiveness.

"Forgive you? For not dying?"

She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.

"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each side got its forces in line.

"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change the figure, a blow below the belt.

"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.

"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."

"I need not have done it."

"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy and comfortable——"

"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If they do and I have to leave, with Jim——"

Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's arm.

Billy Grant had a shocked second.

"Jim?"

"My little brother," from the table.

Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had thought——

"I wonder—whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the table and presumably consent. "Isn't he—don't you think that—I might be allowed to—to help Jim? It would help me to like myself again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."

"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up, her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so? You said it was because of a little property you had, but—that wasn't it—was it?"

"No."

"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not question.

"No, not that, though I——"

She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.

"Then—why? Why?"

"For one of the meanest reasons I know—to be even with some people who had treated me badly."

The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason had helped to make it so.

"A girl that you cared about?"

"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble——"

Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him speechless—that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs persisted.

"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a little—if it will not bore you—about myself and the things I have done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know, I'm—I'm not going to hold you to—to the thing I forced you into. There are ways to fix that."

Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk—the buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer. The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor had slapped her between the shoulders long ago—you know about that—only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips—and found it hard to say the thing he felt he must.

"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not irrevocable. I can fix it up so that——"

"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and snapped her watch shut.

The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.

"Now!" she said.

"I am to go on?"

"Yes, please."

"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly, "will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional minutes?"

"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it, to his disgust, over his knees.

This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near him and he reached over and covered it with his.

"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you some of the things I have to tell."

She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there, looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench—their crutches beside them—its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell—ugly things, many of them—for that was his creed.

And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with many people, what the girl back home would never have understood this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace, joy and wretchedness, birth and death—these she had looked on, all of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.

So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her, knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and kissed her fingers softly.

After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal. When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was taking it all! If only—but there was no hope of that. She could go to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing would be as if it had never been.

At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.

The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in, with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated that she was sleeping.

Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.

He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He took a step—if only his knees——

He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through the open door of the room across.

The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying. Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching the counterpane.

Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper held about her, peering into the darkness.

"I thought I heard—are you worse?" she asked anxiously.

"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How about you?"

"Not asleep yet, but—resting," she replied.

She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped them, ashamed.

"Would you like another blanket?"

"If there is one near."

She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place. He was mustering up his courage to ask for something—a curious state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted without asking.

"I wish you would kiss me—just once!" he said wistfully. And then, seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's the reason I'm not sleeping."

"Don't be absurd!"

"Is it so absurd—under the circumstances?"

"You can sleep quite well if you only try."

She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.

"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"

"But my arms——"

"Over your head!"

He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed—the tip of his nose!

IV

She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have—— He borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.

Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.

That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.

The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day, enlightened her.

"He has pulled through—God and you alone know how," he said. "But as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years—— Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of pepsin?"

The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine glass and the Staff Doctor swallowed and grimaced.

"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly—for, the stress being over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even entitled to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.

"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but steady. "He is not to have it?"

"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair again, but while he's here—by-the-way, you'll have to watch the orderly. He'll bribe him."

"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."

"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk too; but he's a drinker—a habitual drinker."

The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face buried in his hands.

"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said. He's right, you know."

"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."

She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it between his.

"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me, you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow—didn't we?"

She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.

"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness was at himself of course. "If—if you'll sit tight I have a fighting chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I—— Don't take your hand away. Please!"

"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.

"Have I made you cry again?"

"Again?'

"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was trying to stand, and——"

She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried unsuccessfully to take her hand away.

"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be relieved."

"You wouldn't do that!"

"Let go of my hand."

"You wouldn't do that!!"

"Please! The head nurse is coming."

He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the "perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."

The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion, but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion—this latter, of course, quite sub rosa, in view of the above quotation.

The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.

"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes; and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so many bandages.

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Meals come over promptly?"

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Getting any sleep?"

"Oh, yes, plenty—now."

Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"

"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."

"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss Hart."

The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.

"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.

The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant, looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the shave, and she set her lips.

"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."

Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell Billy Grant.

Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point: that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story, because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said: "Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."

Whatever really happened—and only Billy Grant and the lady in question ever really knew—that night at eight o'clock, with Billy Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes shining. And things went on as before—not quite as before; for with the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would waken to the craving again and fight all day.

"I'm afraid I'm about killing her," he said to the Staff Doctor one day; "but it's my chance to make a man of myself—now or never."

The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.

"Fight it out, boy!" he said. "Pretty soon you'll quit peeling and cease being a menace to the public health, and you'd better get it over before you are free again."

So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much himself again—had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too, and sent out for some collars.

Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the dishes for him—against his protest, for he disliked being waited on—he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She coloured.