"My mother's," she said; "her wedding ring."

Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment: "Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn't we get 'em raw and boil them over here?"

It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been in his mind for some time.

"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to bring your tray in here and to eat together? It would be more sociable."

She smiled.

"It isn't permitted."

"Do you think—would another box of orchids——"

She shook her head as she poured out his coffee. "I should probably be expelled."

He was greatly aggrieved.

"That's all foolishness," he said. "How is that any worse—any more unconventional—than your bringing me your extra blanket on a cold night? Oh, I heard you last night!"

"Then why didn't you leave it on?"

"And let you freeze?"

"I was quite warm. As it was, it lay in the hallway all night and did no one any good."

Having got thus far from wedding rings, he did not try to get back. He ate alone, and after breakfast, while she took her half-hour of exercise outside the window, he sat inside reading—only apparently reading, however.

Once she went quite as far as the gate and stood looking out.

"Jenks!" called Billy Grant.

Jenks has not entered into the story much. He was a little man, rather fat, who occupied a tiny room in the pavilion, carried meals and soiled clothes, had sat on Billy Grant's chest once or twice during a delirium, and kept a bottle locked in the dish closet.

"Yes, sir," said Jenks, coming behind a strong odour of spiritus frumenti.

"Jenks," said Billy Grant with an eye on the figure at the gate, "is that bottle of yours empty?"

"What bottle?"

"The one in the closet."

Jenks eyed Billy Grant, and Billy eyed Jenks—a look of man to man, brother to brother.

"Not quite, sir—a nip or two."

"At," suggested Billy Grant, "say—five dollars a nip?"

Jenks smiled.

"About that," he said. "Filled?"

Billy Grant debated. The Nurse was turning at the gate.

"No," he said. "As it is, Jenks. Bring it here."

Jenks brought the bottle and a glass, but the glass was motioned away. Billy Grant took the bottle in his hand and looked at it with a curious expression. Then he went over and put it in the upper bureau drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs. Jenks watched him, bewildered.

"Just a little experiment, Jenks," said Billy Grant.

Jenks understood then and stopped smiling.

"I wouldn't, Mr. Grant," he said; "it will only make you lose confidence in yourself when it doesn't work out."

"But it's going to work out," said Billy Grant. "Would you mind turning on the cold water?"

Now the next twenty-four hours puzzled the Nurse. When Billy Grant's eyes were not on her with an unfathomable expression in them, they were fixed on something in the neighbourhood of the dresser, and at these times they had a curious, fixed look not unmixed with triumph. She tried a new arrangement of combs and brushes and tilted the mirror at a different angle, without effect.

That day Billy Grant took only one cold plunge. As the hours wore on he grew more cheerful; the look of triumph was unmistakable. He stared less at the dresser and more at the Nurse. At last it grew unendurable. She stopped in front of him and looked down at him severely. She could only be severe when he was sitting—when he was standing she had to look so far up at him, even when she stood on her tiptoes.

"What is wrong with me?" she demanded. "You look so queer! Is my cap crooked?"

"It is a wonderful cap."

"Is my face dirty?"

"It is a won—— No, certainly not."

"Then would you mind not staring so? You—upset me."

"I shall have to shut my eyes," he replied meekly, and worried her into a state of frenzy by sitting for fifty minutes with his head back and his eyes shut.

So—the evening and the morning were another day, and the bottle lay undisturbed under the handkerchiefs, and the cold shower ceased running, and Billy Grant assumed the air of triumph permanently. That morning when the breakfast trays came he walked over into the Nurse's room and picked hers up, table and all, carrying it across the hall. In his own room he arranged the two trays side by side, and two chairs opposite each other. When the Nurse, who had been putting breadcrumbs on the window-sill, turned round Billy Grant was waiting to draw out one of the chairs, and there was something in his face she had not seen there before.

"Shall we breakfast?" he said.

"I told you yesterday——"

"Think a minute," he said softly. "Is there any reason why we should not breakfast together?" She pressed her hands close together, but she did not speak. "Unless—you do not wish to."

"You remember you promised, as soon as you got away, to—fix that——"

"So I will if you say the word."

"And—to forget all about it."

"That," said Billy Grant solemnly, "I shall never do so long as I live. Do you say the word?"

"What else can I do?"

"Then there is somebody else?"

"Oh, no!"

He took a step toward her, but still he did not touch her.

"If there is no one else," he said, "and if I tell you that you have made me a man again——"

"Gracious! Your eggs will be cold." She made a motion toward the egg-cup, but Billy Grant caught her hand.

"Damn the eggs!" he said. "Why don't you look at me?"

Something sweet and luminous and most unprofessional shone in the little Nurse's eyes, and the line of her pulse on a chart would have looked like a seismic disturbance.

"I—I have to look up so far!" she said, but really she was looking down when she said it.

"Oh, my dear—my dear!" exulted Billy Grant. "It is I who must look up at you!" And with that he dropped on his knees and kissed the starched hem of her apron.

The Nurse felt very absurd and a little frightened.

"If only," she said, backing off—"if only you wouldn't be such a silly! Jenks is coming!"

But Jenks was not coming. Billy Grant rose to his full height and looked down at her—a new Billy Grant, the one who had got drunk at a club and given a ring to a cabman having died that grey morning some weeks before.

"I love you—love you—love you!" he said, and took her in his arms.

* * * * *

Now the Head Nurse was interviewing an applicant; and, as the H.N. took a constitutional each morning in the courtyard and believed in losing no time, she was holding the interview as she walked.

"I think I would make a good nurse," said the applicant, a trifle breathless, the h.n. being a brisk walker. "I am so sympathetic."

The H.N. stopped and raised a reproving forefinger.

"Too much sympathy is a handicap," she orated. "The perfect nurse is a silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine—this little building here is the isolation pavilion."

"An emotionless machine," repeated the applicant. "I see—an e——"

The words died on her lips. She was looking past a crowd of birds on the windowsill to where, just inside, Billy Grant and the Nurse in a very mussed cap were breakfasting together. And as she looked Billy Grant bent over across the tray.

"I adore you!" he said distinctly and, lifting the Nurse's hands, kissed first one and then the other.

"It is hard work," said Miss Smith—having made a note that the boys in the children's ward must be restrained from lowering a pasteboard box on a string from a window—"hard work without sentiment. It is not a romantic occupation."

She waved an admonitory hand toward the window, and the box went up swiftly. The applicant looked again toward the pavilion, where Billy Grant, having kissed the Nurse's hands, had buried his face in her two palms.

The mild October sun shone down on the courtyard, with its bandaged figures in wheel-chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench, their crutches beside them, its waterless fountain and dingy birds.

The applicant thrilled to it all—joy and suffering, birth and death, misery and hope, life and love. Love!

The H.N. turned to her grimly, but her eyes were soft.

"All this," she said, waving her hand vaguely, "for eight dollars a month!"

"I think," said the applicant shyly, "I should like to come."



GOD'S FOOL

I

The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives intellect—and they move the earth. To some He allots heart—and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence—and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one colour instead of many.

The Dummy was God's fool. Having only a soul and no intelligence, he lived the life of the soul. Through his faded, childish old blue eyes he looked out on a world that hurried past him with, at best, a friendly touch on his shoulder. No man shook his hand in comradeship. No woman save the little old mother had ever caressed him. He lived alone in a world of his own fashioning, peopled by moving, noiseless figures and filled with dreams—noiseless because the Dummy had ears that heard not and lips that smiled at a kindness, but that did not speak.

In this world of his there was no uncharitableness—no sin. There was a God—why should he not know his Father?—there were brasses to clean and three meals a day; and there was chapel on Sunday, where one held a book—the Dummy held his upside down—and felt the vibration of the organ, and proudly watched the afternoon sunlight smiling on the polished metal of the chandelier and choir rail.

* * * * *

The Probationer sat turning the bandage machine and watching the Dummy, who was polishing the brass plates on the beds. The plates said: "Endowed in perpetuity"—by various leading citizens, to whom God had given His best gifts, both heart and brain.

"How old do you suppose he is?" she asked, dropping her voice.

The Senior Nurse was writing fresh labels for the medicine closet, and for "tincture of myrrh" she wrote absently "tincture of mirth," and had to tear it up.

"He can't hear you," she said rather shortly. "How old? Oh, I don't know. About a hundred, I should think."

This was, of course, because of his soul, which was all he had, and which, having existed from the beginning, was incredibly old. The little dead mother could have told them that he was less than thirty.

The Probationer sat winding bandages. Now and then they went crooked and had to be done again. She was very tired. The creaking of the bandage machine made her nervous—that and a sort of disillusionment; for was this her great mission, this sitting in a silent, sunny ward, where the double row of beds held only querulous convalescent women? How close was she to life who had come to soothe the suffering and close the eyes of the dying; who had imagined that her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine and, even worse, a scrubbing brush and a finetooth comb?

The Senior Nurse, having finished the M's, glanced up and surprised a tear on the Probationer's round young cheek. She was wise, having trained many probationers.

"Go to first supper, please," she said. First supper is the Senior's prerogative; but it is given occasionally to juniors and probationers as a mark of approval, or when the Senior is not hungry, or when a probationer reaches the breaking point, which is just before she gets her uniform.

The Probationer smiled and brightened. After all, she must be doing fairly well; and if she were not in the battle she was of it. Glimpses she had of the battle—stretchers going up and down in the slow elevator; sheeted figures on their way to the operating room; the clang of the ambulance bell in the courtyard; the occasional cry of a new life ushered in; the impressive silence of an old life going out. She surveyed the bandages on the bed.

"I'll put away the bandages first," she said. "That's what you said, I think—never to leave the emergency bed with anything on it?"

"Right-oh!" said the Senior.

"Though nothing ever happens back here—does it?'

"It's about our turn; I'm looking for a burned case." The Probationer, putting the bandages into a basket, turned and stared.

"We have had two in to-day in the house," the Senior went on, starting on the N's and making the capital carefully. "There will be a third, of course; and we may get it. Cases always seem to run in threes. While you're straightening the bed I suppose I might as well go to supper after all."

So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case, while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.

The Probationer was from the country and she had never heard of the Avenue. And the Dummy, who walked there daily with the superintendent's dog, knew nothing of its wickedness. In his soul, where there was nothing but kindness, there was even a feeling of tenderness for the Avenue. Once the dog had been bitten by a terrier from one of the houses, and a girl had carried him in and washed the wounds and bound them up. Thereafter the Dummy had watched for her and bowed when he saw her. When he did not see her he bowed to the house.

The Dummy finished the brass plates and, gathering up his rags and polish, shuffled to the door. His walk was a patient shamble, but he covered incredible distances. When he reached the emergency bed he stopped and pointed to it. The Probationer looked startled.

"He's tellin' you to get it ready," shrilled Irish Delia, sitting up in the next bed. "He did that before you was brought in," she called to Old Maggie across the ward. "Goodness knows how he finds out—but he knows. Get the spread off the bed, miss. There's something coming."

* * * * *

The Probationer had come from the country and naturally knew nothing of the Avenue. Sometimes on her off duty she took short walks there, wondering if the passers-by who stared at her knew that she was a part of the great building that loomed over the district, happily ignorant of the real significance of their glances. Once a girl, sitting behind bowed shutters, had leaned out and smiled at her.

"Hot to-day, isn't it?" she said.

The Probationer stopped politely.

"It's fearful! Is there any place near where I can get some soda water?"

The girl in the window stared.

"There's a drug store two squares down," she said. "And say, if I were you——"

"Yes?"

"Oh, nothing!" said the girl in the window, and quite unexpectedly slammed the shutters.

The Probationer had puzzled over it quite a lot. More than once she walked by the house, but she did not see the smiling girl—only, curiously enough, one day she saw the Dummy passing the house and watched him bow and take off his old cap, though there was no one in sight.

Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over—and there is no way out; and God hates them—though, of course, there is that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So they try to put an end to things generally—and end up in the emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going to meet the Almighty?

Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency bed.

Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better, because—well, why should she?

And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental appeals to the Senior to come—and come quickly. The ward got up on elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.

"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."

The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who saw the Dummy and raised a cry.

"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."

The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of course, there was his Father.

Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of changing faces, nurses, internes, patients, visitors—a wall of life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place, where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent, the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint, though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A queer trick of the soul perhaps—or was it super-wisdom?—to choose her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.

Or perhaps—— Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.

And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered, unlovely, stood beside her.

"Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.

To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The miracle of speech was still hers.

"Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm—all in!"

"Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the next bed. "You'll get well a' right—unless you inhaled. Y'ought to 'a' kept your mouth shut."

Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.

"Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."

"You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy——"

The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled—almost fell.

"You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it. I'll——"

The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels, bandages—anything she could imagine as essential. She found the Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in order—only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed; and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining—for had not the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were hidden, though God knows how he knew them?

The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns were dressed by an interne and she was moved back to a bed at the end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused supper. The Dummy was gone—the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as one shoos a chicken.

"Get out of here! You're always under my feet," she had said—not unkindly—and pointed to the door.

The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had not moved. The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the emergency bed and clear away the dressings—the Senior tried diplomacy and offered him an orange from her own corner of the medicine closet. He shook his head.

"I guess he wants to know whether that girl from the Avenue's going to get well," said Irish Delia. "He seems to know her."

There was a titter through the ward at this. Old Maggie's gossiping tongue had been busy during the hour. From pity the ward had veered to contempt.

"Humph!" said the Senior, and put the orange back. "Why, yes; I guess she'll get well. But how in Heaven's name am I to let him know?"

She was a resourceful person, however, and by pointing to the Avenue Girl and then nodding reassuringly she got her message of cheer over the gulf of his understanding. In return the Dummy told her by gestures how he knew the girl and how she had bound up the leg of the superintendent's dog. The Senior was a literal person and not occult; and she was very busy. When the Dummy stooped to indicate the dog, a foot or so from the ground, she seized that as the key of the situation.

"He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby," she observed generally. "All right, if that's the case. Come in and see her when you want to. And now get out, for goodness' sake!"

The Dummy, with his patient shamble, made his way out of the ward and stored his polishes for the night in the corner of a scrub-closet. Then, ignoring supper, he went down the stairs, flight after flight, to the chapel. The late autumn sun had set behind the buildings across the courtyard and the lower part of the silent room was in shadow; but the afterglow came palely through the stained-glass window, with the young John and tall stalks of white lilies, and "To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth" beneath.

It was only a coincidence—and not even that to the Dummy—but Elizabeth had been the Avenue Girl's name not so long ago.

The Dummy sat down near the door very humbly and gazed at the memorial window.

II

Time may be measured in different ways—by joys; by throbs of pain; by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along the west windows.

The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time, and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.

The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.

"She could get better if she would," she said to the interne one day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing together. "She just won't try."

"Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the interne, who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for the towel.

She was a very pretty Probationer.

"She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."

The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.

"She has a home—she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why—why cannot she go back to it, even now?"

The interne poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers touched hers, she never knew it.

"Perhaps they'd not want her after—well, they'd never feel the same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let it go at that. There—there doesn't seem to be any way back, you know."

He was exceedingly self-conscious.

"Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky lips.

And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out to die. The interne watched her as she worked. It rather galled him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to be in such things.

The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at first—pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which the Senior promptly confiscated; and—the Dummy. Morning and evening came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and evening he brought tribute—a flower from the masses that came in daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window, which was only a blur.

For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the convalescents—filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew about the drinking cup and after a time that became his self-appointed task.

On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the interne, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the interne's eyes, and did not know an interne cannot marry for years and years, and that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and worthy of all worship!

* * * * *

The Probationer worried a great deal.

"It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"

"None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here—not souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.

"I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean. You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or—you'll go back on codliver oil to-night."

"Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed the codliver oil.

"Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.

"Now?"

"Now!"

"It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward watching. "The doctor said that I——"

The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles labelled C.

"I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"

And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her ears—down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.

"You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work at the draw sheet. "Get out quick—or I'll throw this cup in your face!"

The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her breath while she smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.

The Girl did not improve as she should. The interne did the dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him—the Senior disliked burned cases—and talked of skin grafting if a new powder he had discovered did no good. Internes are always trying out new things, looking for the great discovery.

The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.

"Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.

The interne considered.

"It isn't healing—not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a minute."

"Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"

"Well, relatives then—some of your own people?"

The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.

"None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she lied. The interne shrugged his shoulders.

"If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.

"Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The interne stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.

"I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is good. It would grow—I know it would."

The interne had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his voice steady he became stern.

"Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded. "Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You brave little girl!"

Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the interne worked out a plan.

"I've fixed it, I think," he said, meeting her in a hallway where he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known she was coming. "Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him. He's got a lot of students—fellows studying for the priesthood—and he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay 'em alive."

"But—is she a daughter of the church?" asked the Probationer. "And even if she were, under the circumstances——"

"What circumstances?" demanded the interne. "Here's a poor girl burned and suffering. The father is not going to ask whether she's of the anointed."

The Probationer was not sure. She liked doing things in the open and with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing. Her chief trouble, after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.

"I don't want to get well," she said wearily when the thing was put up to her. "What's the use? I'd just go back to the same old thing; and when it got too strong for me I'd end up here again or in the morgue."

"Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them."

"Why? To have them read in my face what I've been, and go back home to die of shame?"

The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl's face.

"There—there is nothing in your face to hurt them," she said, flushing—because there were some things the Probationer had never discussed, even with herself. "You—look sad. Honestly, that's all."

The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was still yellow from cigarettes.

"What about that?" she sneered.

"If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?"

"I'll—perhaps," was the most the Probationer could get.

Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in the Avenue Girl's eyes the terrible longing for the things she had given up—for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.

"What day is it?" the Avenue Girl asked once.

"Friday."

"That's baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?" Or: "That's a pretty shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the dairy, wouldn't it?"

"Fine!" said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph in her eyes.

III

That was the day the Dummy stole the parrot. The parrot belonged to the Girl; but how did he know it? So many things he should have known the Dummy never learned; so many things he knew that he seemed never to have learned! He did not know, for instance, of Father Feeny and the Holy Name students; but he knew of the Avenue Girl's loneliness and heartache, and of the cabal against her. It is one of the black marks on record against him that he refused to polish the plate on Old Maggie's bed, and that he shook his fist at her more than once when the Senior was out of the ward.

And he knew of the parrot. That day, then, a short, stout woman with a hard face appeared in the superintendent's office and demanded a parrot.

"Parrot?" said the superintendent blandly.

"Parrot! That crazy man you keep here walked into my house to-day and stole a parrot—and I want it."

"The Dummy! But what on earth——"

"It was my parrot," said the woman. "It belonged to one of my boarders. She's a burned case up in one of the wards—and she owed me money. I took it for a debt. You call that man and let him look me in the eye while I say parrot to him."

"He cannot speak or hear."

"You call him. He'll understand me!"

They found the Dummy coming stealthily down from the top of the stable and haled him into the office. He was very calm—quite impassive. Apparently he had never seen the woman before; as she raged he smiled cheerfully and shook his head.

"As a matter of fact," said the superintendent, "I don't believe he ever saw the bird; but if he has it we shall find it out and you'll get it again."

They let him go then; and he went to the chapel and looked at a dove above the young John's head. Then he went up to the kitchen and filled his pockets with lettuce leaves. He knew nothing at all of parrots or how to care for them.

Things, you see, were moving right for the Avenue Girl. The stain was coming off—she had been fond of the parrot and now it was close at hand; and Father Feeny's lusty crowd stood ready to come into a hospital ward and shed skin that they generally sacrificed on the football field. But the Avenue Girl had two years to account for—and there was the matter of an alibi.

"I might tell the folks at home anything and they'd believe it because they'd want to believe it," said the Avenue Girl. "But there's the neighbours. I was pretty wild at home. And—there's a fellow who wanted to marry me—he knew how sick I was of the old place and how I wanted my fling. His name was Jerry. We'd have to show Jerry."

The Probationer worried a great deal about this matter of the alibi. It had to be a clean slate for the folks back home, and especially for Jerry. She took her anxieties out walking several times on her off-duty, but nothing seemed to come of it. She walked on the Avenue mostly, because it was near and she could throw a long coat over her blue dress. And so she happened to think of the woman the girl had lived with.

"She got her into all this," thought the Probationer. "She's just got to see her out."

It took three days' off-duty to get her courage up to ringing the doorbell of the house with the bowed shutters, and after she had rung it she wanted very much to run and hide; but she thought of the girl and everything going for nothing for the want of an alibi, and she stuck. The negress opened the door and stared at her.

"She's dead, is she?" she asked.

"No. May I come in? I want to see your mistress."

The negress did not admit her, however. She let her stand in the vestibule and went back to the foot of a staircase.

"One of these heah nurses from the hospital!" she said. "She wants to come in and speak to you."

"Let her in, you fool!" replied a voice from above stairs.

The rest was rather confused. Afterward the Probationer remembered putting the case to the stout woman who had claimed the parrot and finding it difficult to make her understand.

"Don't you see?" she finished desperately. "I want her to go home—to her own folks. She wants it too. But what are we going to say about these last two years?"

The stout woman sat turning over her rings. She was most uncomfortable. After all, what had she done? Had she not warned them again and again about having lighted cigarettes lying round.

"She's in bad shape, is she?"

"She may recover, but she'll be badly scarred—not her face, but her chest and shoulders."

That was another way of looking at it. If the girl was scarred——

"Just what do you want me to do?" she asked. Now that it was down to brass tacks and no talk about home and mother, she was more comfortable.

"If you could just come over to the hospital while her people are there and—and say she'd lived with you all the time——"

"That's the truth all right!"

"And—that she worked for you, sewing—she sews very well, she says. And—oh, you'll know what to say; that she's been—all right, you know; anything to make them comfortable and happy."

Now the stout woman was softening—not that she was really hard, but she had developed a sort of artificial veneer of hardness, and good impulses had a hard time crawling through.

"I guess I could do that much," she conceded. "She nursed me when I was down and out with the grippe and that worthless nigger was drunk in the kitchen. But you folks over there have got a parrot that belongs to me. What about that?"

The Probationer knew about the parrot. The Dummy had slipped it into the ward more than once and its profanity had delighted the patients. The Avenue Girl had been glad to see it too; and as it sat on the bedside table and shrieked defiance and oaths the Dummy had smiled benignly. John and the dove—the girl and the parrot!

"I am sorry about the parrot. I—perhaps I could buy him from you."

She got out her shabby little purse, in which she carried her munificent monthly allowance of eight dollars and a little money she had brought from home.

"Twenty dollars takes him. That's what she owed me."

The Probationer had seventeen dollars and eleven cents. She spread it out in her lap and counted it twice.

"I'm afraid that's all," she said. She had hoped the second count would show up better. "I could bring the rest next month."

The Probationer folded the money together and held it out. The stout woman took it eagerly.

"He's yours," she said largely. "Don't bother about the balance. When do you want me?"

"I'll send you word," said the Probationer, and got up. She was almost dizzy with excitement and the feeling of having no money at all in the world and a parrot she did not want. She got out into the air somehow and back to the hospital. She took a bath immediately and put on everything fresh, and felt much better—but very poor. Before she went on duty she said a little prayer about thermometers—that she should not break hers until she had money for a new one.

* * * * *

Father Feeny came and lined up six budding priests outside the door of the ward. He was a fine specimen of manhood and he had asked no questions at all. The Senior thought she had better tell him something, but he put up a white hand.

"What does it matter, sister?" he said cheerfully. "Yesterday is gone and to-day is a new day. Also there is to-morrow"—his Irish eyes twinkled—"and a fine day it will be by the sunset."

Then he turned to his small army.

"Boys," he said, "it's a poor leader who is afraid to take chances with his men. I'm going first"—he said fir-rst. "It's a small thing, as I've told you—a bit of skin and it's over. Go in smiling and come out smiling! Are you ready, sir?" This to the interne.

That was a great day in the ward. The inmates watched Father Feeny and the interne go behind the screens, both smiling, and they watched the father come out very soon after, still smiling but a little bleached. And they watched the line patiently waiting outside the door, shortening one by one. After a time the smiles were rather forced, as if waiting was telling on them; but there was no deserter—only one six-foot youth, walking with a swagger to contribute his little half inch or so of cuticle, added a sensation to the general excitement by fainting halfway up the ward; and he remained in blissful unconsciousness until it was all over.

Though the interne had said there was no way back, the first step had really been taken; and he was greatly pleased with himself and with everybody because it had been his idea. The Probationer tried to find a chance to thank him; and, failing that, she sent a grateful little note to his room:

Is Mimi the Austrian to have a baked apple? [Signed] WARD A.

P.S.—It went through wonderfully! She is so cheerful since it is over. How can I ever thank you?

The reply came back very quickly:

Baked apple, without milk, for Mimi. WARD A. [Signed] D.L.S.

P.S.—Can you come up on the roof for a little air?

She hesitated over that for some time. A really honest-to-goodness nurse may break a rule now and then and nothing happen; but a probationer is only on trial and has to be exceedingly careful—though any one might go to the roof and watch the sunset. She decided not to go. Then she pulled her soft hair down over her forehead, where it was most becoming, and fastened it with tiny hairpins, and went up after all—not because she intended to, but because as she came out of her room the elevator was going up—not down. She was on the roof almost before she knew it.

The interne was there in fresh white ducks, smoking. At first they talked of skin grafting and the powder that had not done what was expected of it. After a time, when the autumn twilight had fallen on them like a benediction, she took her courage in her hands and told of her visit to the house on the Avenue, and about the parrot and the plot.

The interne stood very still. He was young and intolerant. Some day he would mellow and accept life as it is—not as he would have it. When she had finished he seemed to have drawn himself into a shell, turtle fashion, and huddled himself together. The shell was pride and old prejudice and the intolerance of youth. "She had to have an alibi!" said the Probationer.

"Oh, of course," very stiffly.

"I cannot see why you disapprove. Something had to be done."

"I cannot see that you had to do it; but it's your own affair, of course. Only——"

"Please go on."

"Well, one cannot touch dirt without being soiled."

"I think you will be sorry you said that," said the Probationer stiffly. And she went down the staircase, leaving him alone. He was sorry, of course; but he would not say so even to himself. He thought of the Probationer, with her eager eyes and shining hair and her warm little heart, ringing the bell of the Avenue house and making her plea—and his blood ran hot in him. It was just then that the parrot spoke on the other side of the chimney.

"Gimme a bottle of beer!" it said. "Nice cold beer! Cold beer!"

The interne walked furiously toward the sound. Must this girl of the streets and her wretched associates follow him everywhere? She had ruined his life already. He felt that it was ruined. Probably the Probationer would never speak to him again.

The Dummy was sitting on a bench, with the parrot on his knee looking rather queer from being smuggled about under a coat and fed the curious things that the Dummy thought a bird should eat. It had a piece of apple pie in its claw now.

"Cold beer!" said the parrot, and eyed the interne crookedly.

The Dummy had not heard him, of course. He sat looking over the parapet toward the river, with one knotted hand smoothing the bird's ruffled plumage and such a look of wretchedness in his eyes that it hurt to see it. God's fools, who cannot reason, can feel. Some instinct of despair had seized him for its own—some conception, perhaps, of what life would never mean to him. Before it, the interne's wrath gave way to impotency.

"Cold beer!" said the parrot wickedly.

IV

The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each morning found a glow of hope—that died, it is true, by noontime; but it came again with the new day.

"How's Polly this morning, Montmorency?" she would say, and give him a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: "I wish you could talk, Reginald. I'd like to hear what Rose said when you took the parrot. It must have been a scream!"

He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in her eyes.

"The old goat's been pretty good to me, hasn't he?" she said.

"I believe it is very unusual. I wonder"—the Probationer poised the comb—"perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know."

They knew nothing, of course, of the boy John and the window.

"He's about the first decent man I ever knew," said the Avenue Girl—"and he's a fool!"

"Either a fool or very, very wise," replied the Probationer.

The interne and the Probationer were good friends again, but they had never quite got back to the place they had lost on the roof. Over the Avenue Girl's dressing their eyes met sometimes, and there was an appeal in the man's and tenderness; but there was pride too. He would not say he had not meant it. Any man will tell you that he was entirely right, and that she had been most unwise and needed a good scolding—only, of course, it is never the wise people who make life worth the living.

And an important thing had happened—the Probationer had been accepted and had got her cap. She looked very stately in it, though it generally had a dent somewhere from her forgetting she had it on and putting her hat on over it. The first day she wore it she knelt at prayers with the others, and said a little Thank You! for getting through when she was so unworthy. She asked to be made clean and pure, and delivered from vanity, and of some use in the world. And, trying to think of the things she had been remiss in, she went out that night in a rain and bought some seed and things for the parrot.

Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was refused politely.

"You are a part of the institution now," said the interne, with his eyes on her cap. He was rather afraid of the cap. "I cannot cripple the institution."

It was the Dummy who solved that question. No one knew how he knew the necessity or why he had not come forward sooner; but come he did and would not be denied. The interne went to a member of the staff about it.

"The fellow works round the house," he explained; "but he's taken a great fancy to the girl and I hardly know what to do."

"My dear boy," said the staff, "one of the greatest joys in the world is to suffer for a woman. Let him go to it."

So the Dummy bared his old-young arm—not once, but many times. Always as the sharp razor nicked up its bit of skin he looked at the girl and smiled. In the early evening he perched the parrot on his bandaged arm and sat on the roof or by the fountain in the courtyard. When the breeze blew strong enough the water flung over the rim and made little puddles in the hollows of the cement pavement. Here belated sparrows drank or splashed their dusty feathers, and the parrot watched them crookedly.

The Avenue Girl grew better with each day, but remained wistful-eyed. The ward no longer avoided her, though she was never one of them. One day the Probationer found a new baby in the children's ward; and, with the passion of maternity that is the real reason for every good woman's being, she cuddled the mite in her arms. She visited the nurses in the different wards.

"Just look!" she would say, opening her arms. "If I could only steal it!"

The Senior, who had once been beautiful and was now calm and placid, smiled at her. Old Maggie must peer and cry out over the child. Irish Delia must call down a blessing on it. And so up the ward to the Avenue Girl; the Probationer laid the baby in her arms.

"Just a minute," she explained. "I'm idling and I have no business to. Hold it until I give the three o'clocks." Which means the three-o'clock medicines.

When she came back the Avenue Girl had a new look in her eyes; and that day the little gleam of hope, that usually died, lasted and grew.

At last came the day when the alibi was to be brought forward. The girl had written home and the home folks were coming. In his strange way the Dummy knew that a change was near. The kaleidoscope would shift again and the Avenue Girl would join the changing and disappearing figures that fringed the inner circle of his heart.

One night he did not go to bed in the ward bed that was his only home, beside the little stand that held his only possessions. The watchman missed him and found him asleep in the chapel in one of the seats, with the parrot drowsing on the altar.

Rose—who was the stout woman—came early. She wore a purple dress, with a hat to match, and purple gloves. The ward eyed her with scorn and a certain deference. She greeted the Avenue Girl effusively behind the screens that surrounded the bed.

"Well, you do look pinched!" she said. "Ain't it a mercy it didn't get to your face! Pretty well chewed up, aren't you?"

"Do you want to see it?"

"Good land! No! Now look here, you've got to put me wise or I'll blow the whole thing. What's my little stunt? The purple's all right for it, isn't it?"

"All you need to do," said the Avenue Girl wearily, "is to say that I've been sewing for you since I came to the city. And—if you can say anything good——"

"I'll do that all right," Rose affirmed. She put a heavy silver bag on the bedside table and lowered herself into a chair. "You leave it to me, dearie. There ain't anything I won't say."

The ward was watching with intense interest. Old Maggie, working the creaking bandage machine, was palpitating with excitement. From her chair by the door she could see the elevator and it was she who announced the coming of destiny.

"Here comes the father," she confided to the end of the ward. "Guess the mother couldn't come."

It was not the father though. It was a young man who hesitated in the doorway, hat in hand—a tall young man, with a strong and not unhandsome face. The Probationer, rather twitchy from excitement and anxiety, felt her heart stop and race on again. Jerry, without a doubt!

The meeting was rather constrained. The girl went whiter than her pillows and half closed her eyes; but Rose, who would have been terrified at the sight of an elderly farmer, was buoyantly relieved and at her ease.

"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I—we didn't realise it had been so bad. The folks are well; but—I thought I'd better come. They're expecting you back home."

"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes. "I—I'm getting along fine."

"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me—working for me, sewing. She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."

Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.

"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are you going home?"

"If—they want me."

"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything mean to you you let me know."

"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney——"

He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.

"Sweeney—with an e?" he asked politely.

"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.

"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to sleep with a cig—about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal when you get the time."

She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward, her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms full of bandages.

"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.

Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the Probationer.

"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it all—hook and bait! And—oh, yes, I've got something for you." She went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that parrot. I've got a different view of life—maybe—from yours; but I'm not taking candy from a baby."

When the Probationer could speak Rose was taking herself and the purple into the elevator and waving her a farewell.

"Good-bye!" she said. "If ever you get stuck again just call on me."

With Rose's departure silence fell behind the screen. The girl broke it first.

"They're all well, are they?"

"All well. Your mother's been kind of poorly. She thought you'd write to her." The girl clenched her hands under the bedclothing. She could not speak just then. "There's nothing much happened. The post office burned down last summer. They're building a new one. And—I've been building. I tore down the old place."

"Are you going to be married, Jerry?"

"Some day, I suppose. I'm not worrying about it. It was something to do; it kept me from—thinking."

The girl looked at him and something gripped her throat. He knew! Rose might have gone down with her father, but Jerry knew! Nothing was any use. She knew his rigid morality, his country-bred horror of the thing she was. She would have to go back—to Rose and the others. He would never take her home.

Down at the medicine closet the Probationer was carbolising thermometers and humming a little song. Everything was well. The Avenue Girl was with her people and at seven o'clock the Probationer was going to the roof—to meet some one who was sincerely repentant and very meek.

In the convalescent ward next door they were singing softly—one of those spontaneous outbursts that have their origin in the hearts of people and a melody all their own:

'Way down upon de S'wanee Ribber, Far, far away, Dere's wha my heart is turnin' ebber— Dere's wha de old folks stay.

It penetrated back of the screen, where the girl lay in white wretchedness—and where Jerry, with death in his eyes, sat rigid in his chair.

"Jerry?"

"Yes."

"I—I guess I've been pretty far away."

"Don't tell me about it!" A cry, this.

"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry——"

"I believe you, Elizabeth."

"One of the nurses here says——Jerry, won't you look at me?" With some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made me do it."

She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been hurt that I—am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have finished it all long ago, only—I was afraid."

"I would rather have found you dead!"

There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of suffering the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing hand the last wall of his house would fall.

It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end, that this, his saint, would go—and not alone—to join the vanishing circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and stood smiling down at the girl.

"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl bitterly. "And he's a fool!"

The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.

The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white coverlet.

* * * * *

The interne was pacing the roof anxiously. Golden sunset had faded to lavender—to dark purple—to night.

The Probationer came up at last—not a probationer now, of course; but she had left off her cap and was much less stately.

"I'm sorry," she explained; "but I've been terribly busy. It went off so well!"

"Of course—if you handled it."

"You know—don't you?—it was the lover who came. He looks so strong and good—oh, she is safe now!"

"That's fine!" said the interne absently. They were sitting on the parapet now and by sliding his hand along he found her fingers. "Isn't it a glorious evening?" He had the fingers pretty close by that time; and suddenly gathering them up he lifted the hand to his lips.

"Such a kind little hand!" he said over it. "Such a dear, tender little hand! My hand!" he said, rather huskily.

Down in the courtyard the Dummy sat with the parrot on his knee. At his feet the superintendent's dog lay on his side and dreamed of battle. The Dummy's eyes lingered on the scar the Avenue Girl had bandaged—how long ago!

His eyes wandered to the window with the young John among the lilies. In the stable were still the ambulance horses that talked to him without words. And he had the parrot. If he thought at all it was that his Father was good and that, after all, he was not alone. The parrot edged along his knee and eyed him with saturnine affection.



THE MIRACLE

I

Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag. In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the spring air.

She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward. It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds, fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.

And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.

The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look severe and say:

"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"

Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach, would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child her finger to suck—a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort. Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic gurglings—and peace.

In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast, decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne, too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.

But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman, to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and put hot-water bottles in it.

The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was "on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:

"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones, the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The doctor with the red mustache has come"—by which it was known that things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.

Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.

She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz" in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.

The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed. "Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.

Liz meditated majestically.

"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."

"Why?"

Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.

"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she hopes she and the kid'll both die."

The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.

"Then she—isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.

Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.

"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do. Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't he be always throwing it up to her?"

The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.

"Have—have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.

"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.

"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"

The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.

"He—he's very little," she said.

"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six months—eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The little devil!"

She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.

"Does—does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and, vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.

Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.

The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan—of hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the hall.

The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill, high wail, a rising and falling note of distress—the voice of a new soul in protest. She went past with averted face.

Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.

"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no picnic, is it?"

The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes were hard.

"Go away," she said petulantly.

Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have a cup of tea."

The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's face.

"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live and so am I!"

II

Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did, when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she frowned.

Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and kissed them. After that she felt better.

She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap, which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.

If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau, all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has been tucked in her belt with the violets.

She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward order-book, for at the top it said:

Annie Petowski—may sit up for one hour.

And below that:

Goldstein baby—bran baths.

And below that:

I love you. E.J.

"E.J." was the Junior Medical.

So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.

And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the House Committee looked in at the door and said:

"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a sort of benediction."

The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined from the furnace of pain.

"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an odor of peau d'Espagne.

The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.

The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.

"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.

"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't be a fool!"

She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were other ways.

The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran baths, and the other thing written below!

At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel must always wear a frock-coat.

Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.

"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.

"Ninety-eight."

"Her pulse is strong?"

"Yes; she's resting quietly."

"Good.—And—did you get my note?"

This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.

"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.

"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent." And he looked at Liz.

"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan her?"

Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a mother, but she had been named when she was very small.

Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked availeth nothing.

"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I—I love you with all my heart—and if only you——"

The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.

The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with happiness.

And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her despair.

So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained nurse is ever supposed to do.

She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.

But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.

"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the ceiling.

Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew. She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away. So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there, still sleeping.

The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.

"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way she watches the ceiling."

"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.

"Time I had the twins—that's before your time," said Liz—"we had one like that. She went out the window head first the night after the baby came, and took the kid with her."

The Nurse rose with quick decision.

"We must watch her," she said. "Perhaps if I could find—I think I'll go to the telephone. Watch the ward carefully, Elizabeth, and if Annie Petowski tries to feed her baby before three o'clock, take it from her. The child's stuffed like a sausage every time I'm out for five minutes."

Nurses know many strange things: they know how to rub an aching back until the ache is changed to a restful thrill, and how to change the bedding and the patient's night-dress without rolling the patient over more than once, which is a high and desirable form of knowledge. But also they get to know many strange people; their clean starchiness has a way of rubbing up against the filth of the world and coming away unsoiled. And so the Nurse went downstairs to the telephone, leaving Liz to watch for nefarious feeding.

The Nurse called up Rose Davis; and Rosie, who was lying in bed with the Sunday papers scattered around her and a cigarette in her manicured fingers, reached out with a yawn and, taking the telephone, rested it on her laced and ribboned bosom.

"Yes," she said indolently.

The nurse told her who she was, and Rosie's voice took on a warmer tinge.

"Oh, yes," she said. "How are you?... Claribel? Yes; what about her?... What!"

"Yes," said the Nurse. "A girl—seven pounds."

"My Gawd! Well, what do you think of that! Excuse me a moment; my cigarette's set fire to the sheet. All right—go ahead."

"She's taking it pretty hard, and I—I thought you might help her. She—she——"

"How much do you want?" said Rose, a trifle coldly. She turned in the bed and eyed the black leather bag on the stand at her elbow. "Twenty enough?"

"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But—she's awfully despondent—almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's father is?"

Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and balancing the telephone with the other.

"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time is it?"

"Two o'clock."

"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a dollar or two a week."

"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"

"Say, what do you think I am—a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me first—I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So long."

It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it. And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches, were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes uplifted.

The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday to new hope and new life—over the Junior Medical, waiting with the manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a hymn of happiness.

The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel, and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her work. It was good.

Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread she spoke.

"Was it a boy—or a girl?" she asked.

"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every way."

"A girl—to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her eyes wandered back to the window.

But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready. She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room down the hall—which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital rules.

First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of lace and insertion,—and everybody knows that such a dress is used only when a hospital infant is baptised,—and she clothed Claribel's baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum—to break the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and eventually it would be white and beautiful.

The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a sachet.

Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein baby—bran baths, and the other thing written just below.

III

The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.

Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms; and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed there.

At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the hall—Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however, and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.

"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's Easter."

Such munificence appalled the ward.

Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al. The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.

"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him in and presented him to the Nurse.

Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.

When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had moaned and put her fingers in her ears.

"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.

"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said, and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the talking."

Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he was looking at Claribel—a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.

The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the edge of the stiff chair.

"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.

She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch at her throat, as if she were smothering.

"How did you—how did you know I was here?"

"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that, and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.

"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."

"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."

The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as old as the ages, although she did not know it—why this tragedy of hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand. He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.

"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking pretty good."

With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.

"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had written her problem.

"How's the—how's the kid?"—after a moment.

"I don't know—or care."

There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did he know or care.

"What are you goin' to do with it?"

"Kill it!"

Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.

"I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere, can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."

"I don't want it to live."

For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her tormented eyes, and he quailed.

"I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess I'm it, all right."

"Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the world? I tell you, it's mine—mine! And I'll do what I want with it. I'll kill it, and myself too!"

"You don't know what you're saying!"

She had dropped back, white and exhausted.

"Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.

Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his responsibility, and even—why, hang it all——

"Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.

"I don't want to marry you."

He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to hear.

And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half tender.

"Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What do you think of this?"

Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.

"Boy or girl?" he asked politely.

"Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose—for Rose and the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.

"Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe tomato!"

But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken quick root.

"Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms unaccustomed to such tender offices.

"Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."

"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.

After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred uneasily, and frowned.

"Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."

The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.

"You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.

The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen obstinacy.

"What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride. "She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if I'm not fed quick. Here,"—he bent down over Claribel,—"you might as well have dinner now, and stop the row."

Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby stopped wailing and opened her mouth.

"The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over? Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"

Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast. The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small body, contracted around it unconsciously.

She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life was already beating so hard.

"A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"

Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last. Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.

"O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay,"

he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz, and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.

"Are strewn this day in festal preparation, Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away— E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare."

On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened. And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop down on a yellow hospital record.

The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song came up the staircase.

"Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!"

the Junior Medical sang.

The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly. The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make rounds upstairs again.

Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the throne-chair by the record-table.

"He can sing some, can't he!" she said.

"He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.

Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.

"I—I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."

Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking, sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were on the child.

Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do you hate me?"

She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her eyes. She shook her head.

"No."

"Do you—still—like me a little?"

"Yes," in a whisper.

"Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting married and starting all over—eh?"

He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the hollow of her neck.

Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.

"I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm going back home to bed."



"ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"

I

There are certain people who will never understand this story, people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are, too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

That shadowy No Man's Land between the trenches of virtue and sin, where most of us fight our battles and are wounded, and even die, does not exist for them.

The boy in this story belonged to that class. Even if he reads it he may not recognise it. But he will not read it or have it read to him. He will even be somewhat fretful if it comes his way.

"If that's one of those problem things," he will say, "I don't want to hear it. I don't see why nobody writes adventure any more."

Right is right and wrong is wrong. Seven words for a creed, and all of life to live!

This is not a war story. But it deals, as must anything that represents life in this year of our Lord of Peace, with war. With war in its human relations. Not with guns and trenches, but with men and women, with a boy and a girl.

For only in the mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.

The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of the heart.

On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition, for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and flung it overboard.

The steamer had picked him up at Halifax—a cold dawn, with a few pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a fighting man.

The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with his eager eyes—not unlike her own, his eyes were young and inquiring—she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her lips with a small stick of cold cream.

Cold air has a way of drying lips.

He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then, poor lad!

Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.

On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up back of his hairbrushes.

They got rather well acquainted that first day.

"You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."

She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone by.

"You know," he confided—he frequently prefaced his speeches with that—"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."