Aunt Jane stood in the doorway a minute, smiling and looking down the long room. Presently from somewhere there came a piping cry:
"Aunt Jane's come!"
And then another cry—and another: "Aunt Jane's come! Aunt Jane's come!"
No one knew who had started the custom. But some child, some sunny morning, had broken out with it when Aunt Jane appeared. And the others had taken it up, as children will; and now it had become a happy part of the day's routine, as regular as the doctor's visit—or the night nurse's rounds.
"Aunt Jane's come—Aunt Jane's come!"
They broke off from picture-books or blocks, to look up and call out and pass the word along. Then they chanted it together.... And the newcomer in the ward, a boy lying with bandaged face and eyes half closed, turned a first curious, questioning look—to find the white-capped face smiling down at him.
At the top of the house, at either end of the long corridor—in Dr. Carmon's operating-room and here in the Children's Ward—Aunt Jane was not the implacable personage that ruled elsewhere in the hospital.
She beamed down the ward.
A dozen hands reached out to her and she smiled to them and nodded and scolded a little and fussed and drew them all into a happy sense that this was home—and Aunt Jane a kind of new and glorified mother for little children. All the sick ones and lame ones, and the bruised ones and bandaged ones were Aunt Jane's children— It did not seem like a hospital, as one looked down the sunny room, so much as a place where children were gathered in; pinched faces lighted up—for the first time in life, perhaps—with round, shrewd, loving smiles for Aunt Jane; delicate bandaged faces looked out at her wistfully and happily; and laughing, rosy ones turned to her.
There were no unhappy ones there. "Children suffer and don't know," was Aunt Jane's comment.