“Are you ill?” he found himself asking.

“No.”

He shifted his weight uneasily to the other foot.  “Is there anything you want?”

Her face softened into the little-girl look.  Her eyes brimmed with a sadness past remedy.  “What a funny question from you—­you, who have taken from me the only thing I ever let myself want—­the love and dependence of those children.  Success, and having whatever you want, are such common things with you, that you must count them very cheap; but you can’t judge what they mean to others—­or what they may cost them.”

“As I said before, I am sorry, very sorry you have lost your position here; but you have no one but yourself to blame for that.  I should have been very glad to have you remain in the new surgical ward; you are one of the best operative nurses I ever had.”  He added this in all justice to her; and to mitigate, if he could, his own feeling of discomfort.

Margaret MacLean smiled grimly.  “Thank you.  I was not referring to the loss of my position, however; that matters very little.”

“It should matter.”  The voice of the Senior Surgeon became instantly professional.  “Every nurse should put her work, satisfactorily and scientifically executed, before everything else.  That is where you are radically weak.  Let me remind you that it is your sole business to look after the physical betterment of your patients—­nothing else; and the sooner you give up all this sentimental, fanciful nonsense the sooner you will succeed.”

“You are wrong.  I should never succeed that way—­never.  Some cases may need only the bodily care—­maybe; but you are a very poor doctor, after all, if you think that is all that children need—­or half the grown-ups.  There are more people ailing with mind-sickness and heart-sickness, as well as body-sickness, than the world would guess, and you’ve just got to nurse the whole of them.  You will succeed, whether you ever find this out or not; but you will miss a great deal out of your life.”

Anger was rekindling in the eyes of the Senior Surgeon; and Margaret MacLean, seeing, grew gentle—­all in a minute.

“Oh, I wish I could make you understand.  You have always been so strong and well and sufficient unto yourself, it’s hard, I suppose, to be able to think or see life through the iron slats of a hospital crib.  Just make believe you had been a little crippled boy, with nothing belonging to you, nothing back of you to remember, nothing happy coming to you but what the nurses or the doctors or the trustees thought to bring.  And then make believe you were cured and grew up.  Wouldn’t you remember what life had been in that hospital crib, and wouldn’t you fight to make it happier for the children coming after you?  Why, the incurable ward was my whole life—­home, family, friends, work; everything wrapped up in nine little crippled bodies.  It was all I asked or expected of life.  Oh, I can tell you that a foundling, with questionable ancestry, with no birth-record or blood-inheritance to boast of, claims very little of the every-day happiness that comes to other people.  And yet I was so glad to be alive—­and strong and needed by those children that I could have been content all my life with just that.”