Jane Brown stooped and picked them both up and placed them on his lap.  Then, very stern, she marched out of the ward into the corridor, and there subsided into quiet hysterics of mirth.  Twenty-two, who hated to be laughed at, followed her in the chair, looking extremely annoyed.

“What else was I to do?” he demanded, after a time.  “Of course, if you report it, I’m gone.”

“What do you intend to do with it now?” she asked.  All her professional manner had gone, and she looked alarmingly young.

“If I put it back, I’ll only have to steal it again.  Because I am absolutely bored to death in that room of mine.  I have played a thousand games of solitaire.”

The Probationer looked around.  There was no one in sight.

“I should think,” she suggested, “that if you slipped it behind that radiator, no one would ever know about it.”

Fortunately, the ambulance gong set up a clamour below the window just then, and no one heard one of the hospital’s most cherished rules going, as one may say, into the discard.

The Probationer leaned her nose against the window and looked down.  A coloured man was being carried in on a stretcher.  Although she did not know it—­indeed, never did know it—­the coloured gentleman in question was one Augustus Baird.

Soon afterward Twenty-two squeaked—­his chair needed oiling—­squeaked back to his lonely room and took stock.  He found that he was rid of Mabel, but was still a reporter, hurt in doing his duty.  He had let this go because he saw that duty was a sort of fetish with the Probationer.  And since just now she liked him for what she thought he was, why not wait to tell her until she liked him for himself?

He hoped she was going to like him, because she was going to see him a lot.  Also, he liked her even better than he had remembered that he did.  She had a sort of thoroughbred look that he liked.  And he liked the way her hair was soft and straight and shiny.  And he liked the way she was all business and no nonsense.  And the way she counted pulses, with her lips moving and a little frown between her eyebrows.  And he liked her for being herself—­which is, after all, the reason why most men like the women they like, and extremely reasonable.

The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read “Pippa Passes.”  He thought Pippa must have looked like the Probationer.

The Head was a bit querulous that evening.  The Heads of Training Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it only to the First Assistant.  They have to do so many irreconcilable things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions, and remembering the different sorts of sutures the Staff likes, and receiving the Ladies’ Committee, and conducting prayers and lectures, and knowing by a swift survey of a ward that the stands have been carbolised and all the toe-nails cut.  Because it is amazing the way toe-nails grow in bed.