"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"
The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked down at her from a great distance.
"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to know enough about professional ethics for that."
He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the Probationer's mind.
For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.
That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.
She, too, was not a famous speller.
During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records—she did it rather well now—and then arranged the pins in the ward pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.
She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.
Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He planned a concert in the chapel.