Jimmie Sullivan, half leaning against her, looked at them reproachfully. "She can't tell nuthin' while you make such a racket!" he said.
"She likes it!—She likes it!—She don't care!" They returned.
Aunt Jane looked at them and smiled. She took down her hands.
"Let me see—" She glanced from one bed to the other. "I am going to let Edna choose.... She can whisper it to me." She went to a bed across the room, Jimmie Sullivan's frame-leg clanking happily beside her, and bent to the pillow.
The girl lifted a thin arm and threw it about Aunt Jane's neck to draw her close.
Aunt Jane listened and lifted her head and smiled. "All right," she announced.
The room was so still you could hear a pin drop. A nurse passing the lower end of the ward, with a dish in her hand, paused and looked down the quiet room. Every eye was fastened expectantly on the motherly figure moving serenely about.... It crossed to the side of the room and adjusted the skylight shade and brought a big rocker and placed it in the middle of the room under the skylight and put a low chair for Jimmie Sullivan, and another beside it for the child that was limping slowly across to her.... A girl in a wheeled chair propelled herself swiftly down the ward and came to a stop as close to the big rocker as she could get.
Aunt Jane glanced slowly about the ward—at the expectant faces looking at her from every bed.
"Now, the rest of you stay where you are!" she said severely.