More visitors came.  Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers, walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a rouged face and a too confident manner.  A hum of conversation hung over the long room.  The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins, the fireplace fender, and the Probationer’s hair.

Twenty-two sat unnoticed in the doorway.  A young girl, very lame, with a mandolin, had just entered the ward.  In the little stir of her arrival, Twenty-two had time to see that Jane Brown was worth even all the trouble he had taken, and more.  Really, to see Jane Brown properly, she should have always been seen in the sun.  She was that sort.

The lame girl sat down in the centre of the ward, and the buzz died away.  She was not pretty, and she was very nervous.  Twenty-two frowned a trifle.

“Poor devils,” he said to himself.  But Jane Brown put away her hunting-case watch, and the lame girl swept the ward with soft eyes that had in them a pity that was almost a benediction.

Then she sang.  Her voice was like her eyes, very sweet and rather frightened, but tender.  And suddenly something a little hard and selfish in Twenty-two began to be horribly ashamed of itself.  And, for no earthly reason in the world, he began to feel like a cumberer of the earth.  Before she had finished the first song, he was thinking that perhaps when he was getting about again, he might run over to France for a few months in the ambulance service.  A fellow really ought to do his bit.

At just about that point Jane Brown turned and saw him.  And although he had run all these risks to get to her, and even then had an extremely cold tin sign lying on his knee under the blanket, at first she did not know him.  The shock of this was almost too much for him.  In all sorts of places people were glad to see him, especially women.  He was astonished, but it was good for him.

She recognised him almost immediately, however, and flushed a little, because she knew he had no business there.  She was awfully bound up with rules.

“I came back on purpose to see you,” said Twenty-two, when at last the lame girl had limped away.  “Because, that day I came in and you looked after me, you know, I—­must have talked a lot of nonsense.”

“Morphia makes some people talk,” she said.  It was said in an exact copy of the ward nurse’s voice, a frightfully professional and impersonal tone.

“But,” said Twenty-two, stirring uneasily, “I said a lot that wasn’t true.  You may have forgotten, but I haven’t.  Now that about a girl named Mabel, for instance——­”

He stirred again, because, after all, what did it matter what he had said?  She was gazing over the ward.  She was not interested in him.  She had almost forgotten him.  And as he stirred Mr. Simond’s cane fell out.  It was immediately followed by the tin sign, which only gradually subsided, face up, on the bare floor, in a slowly diminishing series of crashes.