service.

But--a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did
not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of
the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.

Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane
Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work,
the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before
the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea
of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such
places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work
the hospital had begun could not be finished.

From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city
that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began
to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of
the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the
operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the
little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The
city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are
cruel, men are kind.

Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for
a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.
A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the
spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it
all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to
the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was
forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed
quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the
quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a
third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.

It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying
all the time.

The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all,
laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.
She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.

In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.
The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man
proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps.
Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of
life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony
had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Mil