'No, none.'
The girl—she was only a girl—looked at him, and there was that in her eye which overcame him.
'None at all?'
'Not that I want to see.'
'Are your parents alive?'
'My mother is, but she lives away in the Five Towns.'
'You've not seen her lately, perhaps?'
He did not reply, and the nurse spoke again, but her voice sounded indistinct and far off.
When he awoke it was night. At the other end of the ward was a long table covered with a white cloth, and on this table a lamp.
In the ring of light under the lamp was an open book, an inkstand and a pen. A nurse—not his nurse—was standing by the table, her fingers idly drumming the cloth, and near her a man in evening dress. Perhaps a doctor. They were conversing in low tones. In the middle of the ward was an open stove, and the restless flames were reflected in all the brass knobs of the bedsteads and in some shining metal balls which hung from an unlighted chandelier. His part of the ward was almost in darkness. A confused, subdued murmur of little coughs, breathings, rustlings, was continually audible, and sometimes it rose above the conversation at the table. He noticed all these things. He became conscious, too, of a strangely familiar smell. What was it? Ah, yes! Acetic acid; his mother used it for her rheumatics.