As Big Belle bent over one of her charges whose face was covered with bandages, she moistened them as skillfully as any trained nurse could have done, and as the prison physician entered the ward she went over to him promptly, standing with calmly folded hands and eyes cast down, the very embodiment of meekness and servitude.
“How is she this morning?” was the doctor’s first question, asked without even raising his eyes from the prescription he was writing.
“Worse, Dr. Brookes,” said “Big Belle” in a lady-like voice. “I should say that the vitriol was still burning deeper, and if I am not much mistaken there is a considerable fever.”
“I’ll have to get you a thermometer,” said Dr. Brookes, without thinking; “you can certainly take temperature, Belle, they tell me you are clever.”
A half-suppressed laugh from the woman startled him. He looked up and caught her eye, and then he, too, smiled slightly.
“I keep forgetting that you people aren’t to be trusted,” he said, pleasantly. “When will I ever learn that I am working in a prison!”
The woman did not answer, but she followed him with her eyes as he moved away. She was by far too clever not to understand his words, and by far too unhappy not to be secretly pleased by them.
“He’d trust me all right, if he dared,” she thought. “As if there was any danger of my killing myself, or any one else for that matter!”
“May I come in a minute?” asked a pleasant voice at the door.
Dr. Brookes looked around quickly, and a smile spread over his features. His visitor was Marion Marlowe, in her nurse’s dress and bare-headed, except for the light shawl, which she was just slipping to her shoulders.