Hugh asked to see the portrait. It was the photograph of a young man in uniform—an ugly likeness of the nurse’s, his sister. He was evidently quite young, and very uninteresting in appearance.
“He is not much like you,” said Hugh, cautiously. “I seem to know that uniform, though. What is his regiment?”
“The 45th Fusiliers,” she said. “They are at Aldershot now. My brother called here to see me the other day.”
“Can there—could there, by any possibility, be any acquaintance between your brother and our patient?” suggested Hugh.
Nurse Bryant completely negatived the idea. Her brother had enlisted in a huff. He had been very silly about his employer’s daughter, and there had been a family row, which was the actual cause of his taking the Queen’s shilling.
“Has she not confided in you—I mean about her family—her affairs?” asked Hugh. “Has she told you—nothing?”
“Not—one—word—not even a hint,” emphatically said the nurse.
Miss Bryant confessed herself more absolutely ignorant of the dying girl’s antecedents, as well as of her actual thoughts and feelings, than she had been of those of any patient up to the present time.
“Try and gain her confidence,” was Hugh’s urgent advice to the nurse. He returned to the hospital more than usually thoughtful.
Next day, when he visited her, he asked her whether she had any dread as to the termination of her illness.