“Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie,” she said nervously.  “It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn’t get in.  I’ve been waiting around most all afternoon.  How is he?”

“He is resting quietly,” said Jane Brown, holding herself very tense, because she wanted to scream.  “He isn’t suffering at all.”

“Could you tell me which window he’s near, Miss Nellie?”

She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser’s mother stood, holding to the bars, peering up at it.  Her lips moved, and Jane Brown knew that she was praying.  At last she turned her eyes away.

“Folks have said a lot about him,” she said, “but he was always a good son to me.  If only he’d had a chance—­I’d be right worried, Miss Nellie, if he didn’t have Doctor Willie looking after him.”

Jane Brown went into the building.  There was just one thing clear in her mind.  Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.

In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.  A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.  Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny.  Six men from one of the wards marched en masse to the lower hall, and were preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered.  The Senior Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency case for two stitches and arnica compresses.

Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very respectfully.  She would have resented it under other circumstances, but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient, and must be humoured.  She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow, although he did not.

Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she should don it.  But she did not look at it very often.

And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.

Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior Surgical Interne.  He took it very hard.

“We’d have been such pals,” he said, rather wistfully, after he saw it was no use.

“We can be, anyhow.”

“I suppose,” he said with some bitterness, “that I’d have stood a better chance if I’d done as you wanted me to about that fellow in your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell.”

“I wouldn’t have married you,” said Jane Brown, “but I’d have thought you were pretty much of a man.”

The more he thought about that the less he liked it.  It almost kept him awake that night.

It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea.  He ran true to form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval.  But she was not enthusiastic.

“It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a newspaper without any news?” she asked, rather listlessly, for her.