“I have always heard that New Englanders asked a great many questions.”
The nurse colored and snapped the scissors vigorously through the last strands of hair. The thick, short locks stuck out stiffly behind the dead woman’s ears. The nurse held out the snakelike braids to Madame Kanaris, who drew back a little.
“Please put them in this box for me,” she said quickly. “Mr. Prince will send for it.”
In leaving the room she touched the dead forehead lightly with a finger, crossed herself, and murmured something in a strange tongue.
“Catholic, I guess,” sniffed the nurse, watching her as she went down the corridor, with that mingling of envy and unwilling admiration that the beautiful Greek always succeeded in implanting in the bosoms of her less-favored sisters.
In a few days’ time Prince and Madame Kanaris returned to the hospital with a picture they desired hung in the ward. It might have been an idealized portrait of Mrs. Prince,—the face of a saint against a background of sunset, or the head of a martyr dark against flame, as the imagination of the beholder should suggest.
The frame was oval with an inscription below the head. It was also heavy, of plaited bronze, with a boxlike backing. It was the work of a finished artist, however, and, being idealized, the portrait was beautiful. It was hung above the bed, as the other wall spaces were occupied with cheerful landscapes.
Madame Kanaris laid a loose bunch of pomegranate flowers on the pillow beneath it, and she and Prince left B⸺ the next day—as they thought—forever.
The new hospital was a popular one, but for some reason the Prince Ward remained vacant. There was nothing mysterious about this; it had been bespoken many times for patients, but a change of mind would occur so naturally that at first nothing was thought of it. In a year or so, however, the continued vacancy began to be a subject of remark among the nurses. But they were too busy and too practical to regard it in any other light than that of a provoking pecuniary loss to the establishment.