“How did they take it?” Twenty-two inquired.  She puckered her eyebrows.

“They don’t like it,” she confessed.  “Some of them were about ready to go home and it—­Tony!” she called sharply.

For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable signs of climbing out and returning to the other man’s wife.

“Tony!” she called, and ran.  Tony scrambled up on the sill.  A sort of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside, waved a derisive hand through the window.

“Good-bye, mees!” he said, and—­disappeared.

It was not a very dramatic thing, after all.  It is chiefly significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at the foot of it.  Tony took a look around.  The courtyard gates were closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the newspaper.  Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.

Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform outside.  Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook him, vigorously.

Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his room.  He was filled with a cold rage—­because she might have fallen on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young; because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.

He had seen her exactly six times.

Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night nurse reported.  She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour.  If they tried to escape, they would hurt her.  Also they would surely be caught and brought back.  And, because she believed in a combination of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.

After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and hung over Johnny’s unconscious figure for a little while, giving motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew at home.

After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.  The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss its pillows or wrinkle the covers.  And struggling, too, with a new idea.  They were prisoners.  No more release cards would brighten the days.  For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would cough.  Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and beef-tea and cornstarch.