"What are you doing?" she said in her sharpest tones. "Allowing a typhoid to sit up! Nurse, you know better than that!"
She laid the girl down on the pillows again herself, and then stood silently by while the bed was finished.
Nurse Hudson flushed crimson. But she had no excuse ready, and presently her superior passed on down the ward, registering in her indignant mind another of many carelessnesses she had noticed. She knew that Ellen Hudson was particularly anxious for her own pleasure to get away punctually that evening. But to risk a case in order to do her work more quickly—the selfishness of the act hurt the Sister's pride in the nursing profession. So thoroughly angry did she feel that she wondered whether she could command herself sufficiently to speak a calm reproof before the nurse left the ward that evening. She was very conscious that a biting sarcasm in her fault-finding had often alienated the confidence of her nurses, and she was now striving hard to mete out to them a more kindly and less impatient justice.
Mrs. 13 was watching her with loving eyes as she went to and fro.
"Patty has been a better girl this afternoon, Sister," she said, when she came within hearing, "ever so much better. I expect she is afraid of the bad egg!"
The laugh did Sister Warwick good, and Patty fell asleep that night with the sound of commendation in her ears, and with a virtuous determination "to be a better gairl to-morrow, too."
"Ain't the buttery-cups beeootiful, Sister? They minds me of home. I was a country girl onst, and picked my hands full of them when I was little. But, bless ye, I ain't been out of London since I married. I've 'most forgotten what the country looks like."
It was Granny 20 who was speaking, as Sister bandaged her leg and helped to tidy her for the night.
"We will put that right before long, Granny, see if we don't. You shall pick flowers and get sunburnt with the best of us. Fancy not seeing the grass and the flowers, and hearing the birds sing, for fifty years! How could you bear it?"
"Well, it's true, Sister. I ain't been further than London Bridge all that time. And there! bless ye, I'm 'most afraid to try it now."