“Good girl,” he said to himself.  “Brave little girl.  But it finishes her here, and she knows it.”

He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her with.  Her own knife, too.  But he had to be as brave as she was.

The paper came out at two o’clock.  At three the First Assistant, looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward and sent her to her room.

Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.

“I’m not to come back, I suppose?”

The First Assistant avoided her eyes.

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser.  Then she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps and went out.

The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped.  There were tears in her eyes.

Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.

First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two.  He went down in the elevator—­he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using a cane—­ready for trouble.  He had always met a fight more than halfway.  It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.

But no one wanted to fight.  The Staff was waiting, grave and perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise.  It felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to get in the newspapers.  But it was not angry.  On the contrary, it was trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new angle.

The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside.  He had smoked eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the Sentinel, and was as unhappy as an interne can be.

“What the devil made you publish it?” he demanded.

Twenty-two smiled.

“Because,” he said, “I have always had a sneaking desire to publish an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed.  If this isn’t a public question, I don’t know one when I see it.”

But he was not smiling when he went in.

An hour later Doctor Willie came in.  He had brought some flowers for the children’s ward, and his arms were bulging.  To his surprise, accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the Staff room.

To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown’s part in that painful half hour was never known.  The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor Willie.  They knew they were being irregular, and were most wretchedly uncomfortable.  Also, there being six of them against one, it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.

He took it so awfully well.  He sat there, with his elbows on a table beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing else to do.  The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him for weeks, offered him a cigar.