er glance.

Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor
that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely
professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the
ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of
blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most
horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up
with a carpenter's square.

On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.
Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with
disapproval.

"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically.
"Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep
moving?"

To which she replied, absently:

"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and
twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.

Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is
curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.
They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when
they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an
intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is
what they _are_ that counts, and when they are together it is what
they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been
ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met
again.

However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were
infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really
indicates.

The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour
when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.

It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
they long for it.

In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
inclination to mutiny.

"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
eyebrows.