“It’s very irregular,” she said.  “I don’t exactly know—­you have only one bad case, haven’t you?”

“Only Johnny.”

The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a table, and examined it for dust.

“Of course,” she said, “it’s a great chance for you.  Show that you can handle this ward, and you are practically safe.”

Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight.  Then she ran her eye over the ward.  There was something vaguely reminiscent of Miss McAdoo in her glance.

Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor that first day of the quarantine.  But Jane Brown was extremely professional and very busy.  There was an air of discipline over the ward.  Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most horrible neatness.  All the beds looked as if they had been made up with a carpenter’s square.

On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.  Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with disapproval.

“What do you mean by sitting down?” he demanded sarcastically.  “Don’t you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep moving?”

To which she replied, absently: 

“Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and twelve soups.”  She was working on the diet slips.

Then she smiled at him.  They were quite old friends already.  It is curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.  They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when they are apart.  It is an actual fact that the growth of many an intimacy is checked by meetings.  Because when people are apart it is what they are that counts, and when they are together it is what they do and say and look like.  Many a beautiful affair has been ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met again.

However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really indicates.

The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for Johnny’s heavy breathing.  There is a quiet hour in a hospital, between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which means that the suppers for the wards are on their way—­a quiet hour when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.

It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound stableward.  To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time a certain heaviness of spirit.  Poor thing though home may have been, they long for it.

In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an inclination to mutiny.