“You wouldn’t do that!”

“Let go of my hand.”

“You wouldn’t do that!!”

“Please!  The head nurse is coming.”

He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the “perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine.”

The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion, but did not enter.  The reason for this was twofold:  first, she had confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion—­this latter, of course, quite sub rosa, in view of the above quotation.

The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.

“Good morning,” she said briskly.  “Have you sent over the soiled clothes?” Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes; and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so many bandages.

“Yes, Miss Smith.”

“Meals come over promptly?”

“Yes, Miss Smith.”

“Getting any sleep?”

“Oh, yes, plenty—­now.”

Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient’s room, where Billy Grant sat.  At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed.  “I thought he was older than that!”

“Twenty-nine,” said the Nurse; “twenty-nine last Fourth of July.”

“H’m!” commented the Head Nurse.  “You evidently know!  I had no idea you were taking care of a boy.  It won’t do.  I’ll send over Miss Hart.”

The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress clutching at Miss Hart’s hand, and failed.

“Jenks is here, of course,” she said, Jenks being the orderly.

The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head nurse.  She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant, looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the shave, and she set her lips.

“I am astonished beyond measure,” she said.  “Miss Hart will relieve you at two o’clock.  Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the afternoon to yourself.  Report in L Ward in the morning.”

Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell Billy Grant.

Now the stories about what followed differ.  They agree on one point:  that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at two o’clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he would none of her.  Here the divergence begins.  Some say he got the superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he would have to alter his plans.  Another and more likely story, because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o’clock a florist’s boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said:  “Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest.”