The house physician was going back to his quarters and to the rest that was so often broken.
"Good night," she added, and then, with a half smile, she added: "Don't bring me a case like that again for a long time, please! And yesterday was his birthday too, they tell me—poor mite!"
The doctor's reply to this was a happy one. He said—
"Then we must wish him many happy returns of to-day instead!"
Sister Warwick could sleep no more that night—or early morning rather. She tried, with a conscientious remembrance of the day's work to come. But such episodes tore her tenderest sympathies in a way that the nurses, who thought her hard and cold, would never have credited.
She lay on her couch, not thinking so much in detail of the scene of conflict she had just been through, as of the ever-recurring wonder that such things had to be. These sudden, dashing, jangling chords in life seemed so inexplicable; and for children to suffer so, and for peaceful lives to have such dark passages! And then some lines of Browning flashed into her mind, and she repeated them to herself over and over again, till the meaning sank in and soothed her.
"Why rush the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear!
Each sufferer says his say, his end of the weal and woe;
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome, 'tis we musicians know."
The quiet of the night was broken by a sudden trampling of feet in the hospital square. Sister Warwick guessed what it meant—an operation in the theatre. She could hear the even tread of the porters as they carried the stretcher and the clank as it rested on the stone floor. Now a messenger was running round to the college and stopping beneath the students' windows. His voice reached her ears—
"Operation! Operation!"
Coming in the darkness and shrouded by night, it would all have seemed weird and uncanny if custom had not reconciled her to the strangeness of the sounds. As it was, the discordant noises only served—by some connection of ideas—to turn her thoughts to another anxiety—the special "crook in her lot" just now. She lay and tried to put the matter clearly before her mind.