The driver jerked the horse aside, and leapt from his seat, the usual crowd, which seems to spring instantaneously from the very stones, collected and surged round, the usual policeman forced his way through, and Ida was picked up and carried to the pavement.
There was a patch of blood on the side of her head—the dear, small head which had rested on Stafford's breast so often!—and she was unconscious.
"'Orse struck 'er with 'is 'oof," said the policeman, sententiously.
"'Ere, boy, call a keb. I'll have your name and address, young man."
A cab was brought, and Ida, still unconscious, was carried to the
London Hospital.
And lay there, in the white, painfully clean, carbolic-smelling ward, attended by the most skillful doctors in England and by the grave and silent nurses, who, notwithstanding their lives of stress and toil, had not lost the capacity for pity and sympathy. Indeed, no one with a heart in her bosom could stand up unmoved and hear the girl moaning and crying in a whisper for "Stafford."
Day and night the white lips framed the same name—Stafford,
Stafford!—as if her soul were in the cry.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
When Ida came to she found the sister of the ward and a young nurse bending over her with placid and smiling faces. Why a hospital nurse should under any and every circumstance be invariably cheerful is one of those mysteries worthy to rank with the problem contained in the fact that an undertaker is nearly always of a merry disposition.
Of course Ida asked the usual questions:
"Where am I?" and "How long have I been here?" and the sister told her that she was in the Alexandria ward of the London Hospital, and that she had been there, unconscious, for ten days.