“Poor things! They were little else than boy and girl, and they worried more about each other than they thought about themselves. The wife’s only trouble was that she wouldn’t be able to do anything for ‘poor Jack.’ ‘Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won’t you?’ she would cry, with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment I went in to him it would be: ‘Oh, don’t trouble about me, nurse, I’m all right. Just look after the wifie, will you?’
“I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her sister, I was nursing them both. It was an unprofessional thing to do, but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the doctor that I could manage. To me it was worth while going through the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two sick-rooms. The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people imagine. It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in. It gave me a new heart, nursing these young people.
“The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was a wee slip of a girl, and her strength—what there was of it—ebbed day by day. As he got stronger he would call out more and more cheerfully to her through the open door, and ask her how she was getting on, and she would struggle to call back laughing answers. It had been a mistake to put them next to each other, and I blamed myself for having done so, but it was too late to change then. All we could do was to beg her not to exhaust herself, and to let us, when he called out, tell him she was asleep. But the thought of not answering him or calling to him made her so wretched that it seemed safer to let her have her way.
“Her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was. ‘It will worry him so,’ she would say; ‘he is such an old fidget over me. And I am getting stronger, slowly; ain’t I, nurse?’
“One morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was, and she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather strength to do so. He seemed to detect the effort, for he called back anxiously, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, dear?’
“‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘getting on famously. Why?’
“‘I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,’ he answered; ‘don’t call out if it tries you.’
“Then for the first time she began to worry about herself—not for her own sake, but because of him.
“‘Do you think I am getting weaker, nurse?’ she asked me, fixing her great eyes on me with a frightened look.
“‘You’re making yourself weak by calling out,’ I answered, a little sharply. ‘I shall have to keep that door shut.’