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Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some one; and, because she’s an elemental creature, if the object of her affections turns elsewhere she’s rather apt to use a knife or a razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency bed.

Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better, because–well, why should she?

And so the Dummy’s Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental appeals to the Senior to come–and come quickly. The ward got up on elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.

“Hot-water bottles and screens,” it said variously. “Take her temperature. Don’t be frightened! There’ll be a doctor in a minute.”

The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who saw the Dummy and raised a cry.

“Look at the Dummy!” she said. “He’s crying.”

The Dummy’s world had always been a small one. There was the superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of course, there was his Father.

Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of changing faces, nurses, internes, patients, visitors–a wall of life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place, where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent, the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint, though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A queer trick of the soul perhaps–or was it super-wisdom?–to choose her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.

Or perhaps—- Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy’s polished choir rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.

And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at Delia’s cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered, unlovely, stood beside her.

“Rotten luck, old top!” she said faintly.

To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The miracle of speech was still hers.

“Cigarette!” explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on her. “Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I’m–all in!”

“Don’t you talk like that,” said Irish Delia, bending over from the next bed. “You’ll get well a’ right–unless you inhaled. Y’ought to ‘a’ kept your mouth shut.”

Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.

“Humph!” she said, without troubling to lower her voice. “I’ve seen her often. I done her washing once. She’s as bad as they make ’em.”

“You shut your mouth!” Irish Delia rose to the defence. “She’s in trouble now and what she was don’t matter. You go back to bed or I’ll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy—-“

The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled–almost fell.