Ignorant of all this, he could only lie and watch her moving about the ward, tantalizingly trim and pretty in her nurse's dress; wait till some softening of her coldness would justify the clean confession he ached to make. Always the desire was with him and it waxed with the days. But whether or no she discerned it lurking behind his surreptitious glances, she afforded no opportunity, and what can a man do against a fate that nips every approach to the tender with nasty medicine or chill phrase—"You are not to talk."
"I believe you like to give me that stuff," he growled one day.
"Doctor's orders," she severely replied, and her stony face effectually repressed him while indicating that she was not to be drawn from her vantage-ground by that or a sudden remark—"It seems strange to see you in that uniform."
"Doesn't feel so to me," she coldly answered, adding, with a spice of malice, "If it did I should get used to it, for I expect to wear it for the next three years."
He winced, and he did not see her smile as he gave her his angry back—that or her droopings over his sleep an hour thereafter. Alone in the quiet ward, bent so low that her breath moved the hair on his temples, the occasion vividly recalled the night, long ago, when she had watched the moon etch with line and shadow the promise of the future upon his face. It lay there now, under her soft breath, the fulfilment. For two years stress and struggle had tooled away every roughness and left the accomplished promise, a man wrought by circumstance to a great fineness.
She also had changed—from a well-intentioned if careless girl to a thoughtful woman. Contact with life in the rough had rubbed the scales from her eyes and now she saw clearly—many things, but all centring on one. Outside people were declaiming against the vindictive fate that had joined with the monopoly against this their champion. That morning's papers had it that Greer & Smythe were surely ruined. Yet she was glad, overjoyed. Wealthy and honored, it would have been difficult to the verge of impossibility for her to go back to him. Always she would have felt that he might doubt her motives. But now—
"It's time to take your medicine!" She sprang up as he opened his eyes, wondering if he had felt her light kiss.
Had he, it would have been "curtain" there and then, but as he did not the play went on, and its sequence proves that, however honorable her intentions, she had by no means relinquished her sex's unalienable right to bring things about in its own illogical, tantalizing, perversely charming way. Drooping over his sleep, hoping that he would wake and catch her, she took care that he should not—assumed a statuesque coldness at the first quiver of his eyelids. Undoubtedly, and with her sex's habitual unfairness, she scandalously abused her position, exercising a tyranny that was as sweet to herself as mortifying to him.
"You must not do that—must do this—now go to sleep." She hugged her power in place of him, and when he achieved a successful revolt against her ban of silence by appealing to the Head for permission to talk with Smythe, she revenged herself by injecting a personal interest into her dealings with Carruthers. It was madness for him to see their heads close together over his chart; the shining eyes she brought back from whispered conferences in the hall. To be sure, it was all about pills and plasters, but how was he to know that? And it was in revenge for this shamelessly injurious conduct that he arranged the scene which opens the second act.
On the morning that he was promoted from spoon-feed to the dignity of a tray, behold him! head bent, elbows square with his ears, knife and fork grabbed at their points, proving his indifference to her opinion by the worst behavior that recent better practice permitted. Alas! he was cast all through for a losing part. Displaying, before his face, the irritating curiosity which a child bestows on a feeding lion, she privately peeped from behind the door-screen, gloated over the old familiar spectacle. She caught him coming and going. Also she turned a delighted ear when he dropped into the homely settler speech; listened for the old locutions; but called his bluff when he overdid the part by running amuck of the grammar in a manner frightful to behold.