With that he turned his face to the wall and shut his nice brown eyes again.
The nurse waited a few minutes fussing around the immaculate room, giving him his medicine, taking his temperature and writing something on the chart. Then she went away again, and he sighed. All by himself he sighed! And sighed! He tried to pray, but it only turned out in a sigh. But perhaps it reached to Heaven, for God heard the sighs and the tears of his poor foolish children of Israel, and would He not hear a sigh today, even if it really ought to have been a prayer?
“I’m all alone!” he said, quite like a sobbing child. “I’m all alone! And what’s the use?”
Then the nurse opened the door softly and looked in. It was growing dusky in the room, and the shadows were thick over where he lay. But there was something electric in the way she turned the knob, like well suppressed excitement.
“There is some one to see you,” she said, in what she meant to make quite a colorless voice. The doctor had said it would not do to excite the patient.
“Some one to see me?” glowered the man on the bed. “There couldn’t be! There isn’t anybody. Who is it?”
“One of them is a minister. He looks very nice.”
“Oh!” groaned the patient disappointedly, “is that all? Who told him to come?”
“Nobody,” said the nurse cheerfully. “He’s not from the village. They came in a car. There’s a young man with him. You’d better let them come up. They look real jolly.”
“Did they know my name?” he glared, opening his eyes at this.