“Entirely, my dear young lady, entirely. But we have to think of the other patients, you see. Still, as a great favour, and just for ten minutes. . . .”
He led her up stone-staircases, down endless miles of corridors where blue-clad patients shuffled and limped on noiseless slippers, till they came to a white-painted doorway marked, “Officers Only”; up yet another staircase to a stone half-landing. Here a capped nurse met them.
“This is Mrs. Jameson,” said the Registrar. “I’ve promised her she may see her husband. But only for ten minutes, Sister. Only for ten minutes.”
“Is he very bad?” asked Patricia.
“He’s asleep, I think,” said the Sister.
The Registrar made his adieux; clattered off downstairs. The two women passed into the ward: a long bare room of ten beds whose occupants looked up incuriously at the accustomed swish of the Sister’s linen skirt, displaying scarcely more interest on sight of Patricia.
The last bed of all was screened.
“He’s in here,” whispered the Sister. She shifted one of the screens noiselessly; and Patricia tip-toed in.
For a moment, the joy of seeing him eclipsed judgment. Then it was no longer merely the loving woman, Peter’s wife, who looked down on him; but Patricia Baynet the doctor’s daughter, sickness-wise by inheritance!
He lay on his back, bandaged arm outside the coverlet. In the shadow cast by the screens, his unshaved face showed thin and fine-drawn. She hardly noticed these symptoms; she had expected and discounted them. She noticed something else—his breathing. It came spasmodically, in quick uneven jerks through half-opened lips. Twice, during the ten minutes she stood watching him, he seemed about to awaken; moaned in his sleep. . . . The Sister signalled to her that it was time to leave him. Very quietly, she withdrew; and they passed out of the ward again.