The sister nodded and left her, and Ida closed her eyes again: but not to sleep. She recalled her flight from Laburnum Villa, her wandering through the streets, the crowded and noisy quay, and the strange hallucination, the vision of Stafford standing on the stern of the vessel. Of course, it was only a vision, an hallucination; but how real it had seemed! So real that it was almost difficult to believe that it was not he himself. She smiled sadly at the thought of Stafford, the son of the great Sir Stephen Orme, sailing in a cattle-ship!
The hours passed in a kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; and on the second day after her return to consciousness, began a conversation with her next-door neighbour, a pleasant-looking woman who had eyed her wistfully several times, but who had been too shy to address "the young lady." She was a country woman from Dorsetshire—up to London on a visit "to my daughter, miss, which is married to a man as keeps a dairy." It was her first visit to London; she had wandered from her daughter's lost her, and, in her confusion, tumbled down the cellar of a beer-shop. She told Ida the history of some of the other cases, and Ida found herself listening with an interest which astonished her.
Nurse Brown, seeing the two talking, nodded approvingly.
"That's right," she said, with a smile. "You keep each other company.
It passes the time away."
Very soon, Ida found herself taking an interest in everything that went on, in the noiseless movements of the nurses, in the arrival of a new case, in the visit of the doctors and the chaplain, and the friends of the other patients. Let the pessimists say what they may, there is a lot of good in human nature; and it comes out quite startlingly in the ward of a hospital. Ida was amazed at the care and attention, the patience and the devotion which were lavished on herself and her fellow-sufferers; a devotion which no money can buy, and which could not have been exceeded if they had one and all been princesses of the blood royal.
One instance of this whole-souled devotion and unstinting charity occurred on the third day and brought the tears to her eyes, not only then but whenever she thought of it in the after years. A tiny mite of a baby, only a few weeks old was brought into the ward and laid in a cot not very far from Ida's bed. The nurses and the doctors crowded round it with eager attention. It was watched day and night; if it cried, at the first note of the feeble wail, a couple of nurses flew to the cot, and, if necessary, a famous physician was telephoned for: and came promptly and cheerfully. The whole ward was wrapped up in the tiny mite, and Ida leant on her elbow and craned forward to get a glimpse of it; and felt towards it as she would have felt if it had been a little sick or wounded lamb in Herondale.
"What is the matter with it, poor little thing?" she asked the sister.
"The spine," replied the sister, bending tenderly over the cot and taking the emaciated little paw in her comforting, ministering hand.
"Will it get well?" asked Ida, quite anxiously.
The sister shook her head.