This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near him and he reached over and covered it with his.

“Please!” he begged.  “For company!  And it will help me to tell you some of the things I have to tell.”

She left it there, after an uneasy stirring.  So, sitting there, looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench—­their crutches beside them—­its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and the ring.  And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell—­ugly things, many of them—­for that was his creed.

And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with many people, what the girl back home would never have understood this girl did and faced unabashed.  Life, as she knew it, was not all good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace, joy and wretchedness, birth and death—­these she had looked on, all of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.

So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her, knowing that he was burying it with her.  When he finished, her hand on the table had turned and was clasping his.  He bent over and kissed her fingers softly.

After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal.  When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose.  How well she was taking it all!  If only—­but there was no hope of that.  She could go to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing would be as if it had never been.

At nine o’clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the night.  The lights in the sickroom were out.  In the hall a nightlight burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep.  He tried counting the lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.

The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors open between.  The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in, with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves falling away loosely from her white, young arms.  So, aching with inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated that she was sleeping.

Then he got up.  This is a matter of difficulty when one is still very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping first one leg, then the other, over the side.  Properly done, even the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.

He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to relinquish the chair.  He had made no sound.  That was good.  He would tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper.  He took a step—­if only his knees——­