The ward felt extremely low in its mind.

* * * * *

That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in H with a lot of desperate men.  They both grew rather heated over the discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all.  Twenty-two lay awake half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now.  It was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!

Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of it.  He wrote: 

“For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.”—­

And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself.  Not, of course, that he wanted to shine at all.  It was the looking two ways that hurt.

The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an equally sooty place with a wispy fountain.  And because the whole situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered palely through the smoke.

The S.S.I. sauntered out.  He had thought he saw the Probationer from his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance to join her.  But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the courtyard.

He was trying to work out this problem:  would the advantage of marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?

He decided to marry early and hang the expense.

The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension deepened around Jane Brown’s mouth.  Perhaps it has not been mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a wistful mouth.  For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.

Jane Brown felt that something was wrong.  Doctor Willie came in once or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of payment.  All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and not for reward.  He called her “Nellie,” to the delight of the ward, which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by Johnny’s bed.  But the Probationer was quick to realise that the Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.

That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided between proper respect for an interne and fury over the wrinkling of her table covers.  It was during one of these visits that she spoke of Doctor Willie.