“Why, I thought you had been in Bellevue for years?”
“Oh, yes! off and on I have. But then I was only a nurse with five dollars a month. Not much chance to make money, except once in a while, when somebody outside wants a thing hushed up, like this, for instance, or a patient happens to hide a few dollars under her pillow, which gives a few lean pickings and stealings to the nurses.”
Madame De Marke’s eyes brightened, and a crafty smile stole over her lips. “Perhaps she’ll have some money hid away. I shouldn’t wonder; enough to pay for your trouble all round; she always was hoarding up. Oh, I have no doubt you may trust to finding heaps of money between her beds, but she’ll take care of it while there is a breath of life in her, never fear that.”
The nurse laughed a low, sly laugh, that rather discomposed her hostess.
“I’ve searched,” she said; “the poor thing lay insensible two whole hours.”
“Then you found nothing?” inquired the Frenchwoman, with a look of keen anxiety.
“Nothing but a little silk bag, with some papers in it.”
“Papers! What were they? I have missed papers. What were they? Or perhaps you can’t read. Let me look at the papers.”
“Oh! yes,” answered the nurse, demurely, “I can read. There was a paper with some poetry on it.”
“Poetry!” cried Madame De Marke, in a tone of ineffable contempt, but which gave forth a burst of relief also. “Poetry! is that all?”