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“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.”

Whatever really happened–and only Billy Grant and the lady in question ever really knew–that night at eight o’clock, with Billy Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes shining. And things went on as before–not quite as before; for with the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would waken to the craving again and fight all day.

“I’m afraid I’m about killing her,” he said to the Staff Doctor one day; “but it’s my chance to make a man of myself–now or never.”

The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.

“Fight it out, boy!” he said. “Pretty soon you’ll quit peeling and cease being a menace to the public health, and you’d better get it over before you are free again.”

So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much himself again–had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too, and sent out for some collars.

Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the dishes for him–against his protest, for he disliked being waited on–he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She coloured.

“My mother’s,” she said; “her wedding ring.”

Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment: “Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn’t we get ’em raw and boil them over here?”

It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been in his mind for some time.

“Wouldn’t it be possible,” he asked, “to bring your tray in here and to eat together? It would be more sociable.”

She smiled.

“It isn’t permitted.”