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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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