The words died on her lips. She was looking past a crowd of birds on the windowsill to where, just inside, Billy Grant and the Nurse in a very mussed cap were breakfasting together. And as she looked Billy Grant bent over across the tray.
"I adore you!" he said distinctly and, lifting the Nurse's hands, kissed first one and then the other.
"It is hard work," said Miss Smith—having made a note that the boys in the children's ward must be restrained from lowering a pasteboard box on a string from a window—"hard work without sentiment. It is not a romantic occupation."
She waved an admonitory hand toward the window, and the box went up swiftly. The applicant looked again toward the pavilion, where Billy Grant, having kissed the Nurse's hands, had buried his face in her two palms.
The mild October sun shone down on the courtyard, with its bandaged figures in wheel-chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench, their crutches beside them, its waterless fountain and dingy birds.
The applicant thrilled to it all—joy and suffering, birth and death, misery and hope, life and love. Love!
The H.N. turned to her grimly, but her eyes were soft.
"All this," she said, waving her hand vaguely, "for eight dollars a month!"
"I think," said the applicant shyly, "I should like to come."