Twenty-two felt a certain depression.  He reflected rather grimly that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently given a hang whether he turned up or not.

“Is he going to live?” he inquired.  He could see that the ward nurse had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.

“O yes,” said Jane Brown.  “I think so now.  The interne says they have had a message from Doctor Willie.  He is coming.”  There was a beautiful confidence in her tone.

Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four hours.  Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently.  Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.

“Where is the young rascal?” said Doctor Willie.  “Up to his old tricks, Nellie, and struck by a train.”  He put a hand under her chin, which is never done to the members of the training school in a hospital, and searched her face with his kind old eyes.  “Well, how does it go, Nellie?”

Jane Brown swallowed hard.

“All right,” she managed.  “They want to operate, Doctor Willie.”

“Tut!” he said.  “Always in a hurry, these hospitals.  We’ll wait a while, I think.”

“Is everybody well at home?”

It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her training—­the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear of death.

“All well.  And——­” he glanced around.  Only the Senior Surgical Interne was in sight, and he was out of hearing.  “Look here, Nellie,” he said, “I’ve got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my satchel.  Your mother sent them.”

She nearly lost her professional manner again then.  But she only asked him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs of wagons.

Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what was meant.  Not just then, anyhow.

In the doctors’ room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted a cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.

“That trephining’s off,” he said, briefly.

Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird, coloured.

Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night.  He needed exercise, he felt.  But there was something else.  Miss Brown had been just a shade too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so ready that he feared she had been more polite than sincere.  Probably she still believed there was a Mabel.  Not that it mattered, except that he hated to make a fool of himself.  He roused once in the night and was quite sure he heard her voice down the corridor.  He knew this must be wrong, because they would not make her work all day and all night, too.

But, as it happened, it was Jane Brown.  The hospital provided plenty of sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and somebody paid.  There had been a night operation, following on a busy day, and the operating-room nurses needed help.  Out of a sound sleep the night Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.