"Marion, how soundly you have slept—and not even undressed! It is eight o'clock, and time for you to go on night-duty. Doctor is going his evening rounds."
Only half-awakened, the horror of her dream still holding her, Sister Marion pushed the nurse away from her, threw herself from her bed, and flew along the corridor. From the door of the private ward the doctor was issuing; he stared at her wild, white look, her tumbled, uncovered hair. She seized him by the arm. "Doctor!" she sobbed. "The man in there has been cruel to me, but I want to nurse him—I want to save him! Never, never could I have done him any harm!"
"Why should you have done him any harm?" the doctor asked, soothingly. "Who would have harmed the poor fellow? Come and see."
He softly opened the door of the private ward, and with his hand upon her arm, led her in.
The matron and one of the nurses stood on either side of the bed, from which the scarlet blanket had been removed. The long white sheet which had replaced it was pulled up over the face of the recumbent form.
"He died an hour ago in his sleep," the matron said. "He did not regain consciousness after you left him. I have been with him all the time."
Sister Marion, with dazed eyes, looked down upon her hands—slowly, from one to the other. Clean, clean, thank Heaven! Looked at her spotless apron, at the sheet showing the sharp outline of the figure on the bed.
"Was there, upon his breast, a little ivory-handled penknife?" she asked.
But before they had told her, wonderingly, no, she had fallen on her knees beside the quiet figure and was sobbing to herself a prayer of thanksgiving.
"A sensitive, imaginative woman—she has been wakened too suddenly," the doctor said.