o--to the thing I forced you into.
There are ways to fix that."

Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and
give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk--the
buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.
The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely
that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor
had slapped her between the shoulders long ago--you know about
that--only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting
there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his
respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did
it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable
she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips--and found it hard to
say the thing he felt he must.

"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not
irrevocable. I can fix it up so that----"

"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and
snapped her watch shut.

The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down
under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing
him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.

"Now!" she said.

"I am to go on?"

"Yes, please."

"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me
any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly,
"will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional
minutes?"

"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it,
to his disgust, over his knees.

This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near
him and he reached over and covered it with his.

"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you
some of the things I have to tell."

She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there,
looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in
wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench--their crutches
beside them--its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her
about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and
the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand
under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning
away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell--ugly
things, many of them--for that was his creed.

And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariousl