k, but only waved his hand with an
impatient gesture and was gone.

CHAPTER XVI

HOW POLLY WENT HOME

"We'll have to move poor Polly, if she lives thro' the night," the
nurse said to the house doctor in the hospital that night. "She is
making all the patients homesick. To hear her calling for her mother or
for 'someone from 'ome' is hard on the sick and well."

"What are her chances do you think?" the doctor asked gravely.

He was a wiry little man with a face like leather, but his touch
brought healing and his presence, hope.

"She is dying of homesickness as well as typhoid," the nurse said
sadly, "and she seems so anxious to get better, poor thing! She often
says 'I can't die miss, for what'll happen mother.' But for the last
two days, in her delirium, she seems to be worrying more about her work
and her flowers. I think they were pretty hard people she lived with.
'Surely she'll praise me this time,' she often says, 'I've tried my
'ardest.' The strenuous life has been too much for poor Polly. Listen
to her now!"

Polly was singing. Clear and steady and sweet, her voice rang over the
quiet ward, and many a fevered face was raised to listen. Polly's mind
was wandering in the shadows, but she still sang the songs of home in a
strange land:

Down by the biller there grew a green willer
A weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

And over and over again she sang with a wavering cadence, incoherently
sometimes, but always with tender pleading, something about "where the
stream was a-flowin', the gentle kine lowin', and over my grave keep
the green willers growin'."

"It is pathetic to hear her," the nurse said, "and now listen to her
asking about her poppies."

"In the box, miss; I brought the seed hacross the hocean, and they wuz
beauties, they wuz wot came hup. They'll be noddin' and wavin' now red
and 'andsome, if she hasn't cut them. She wouldn't cut them, would she,
miss? She couldn't 'ave the 'eart, I think."

"No indeed, she hasn't cut them," the nurse declared with decision,
taking Polly's burning hand tenderly in hers. "No one could cut down
such beauties. What nonsense to think of such a thing, Polly. They're
blooming, I tell you, red and handsome, almost as tall as you are,
Polly."

The office-boy touched the nurse's arm.

"A gentleman who gave no name left this box for one of the typhoid
patients," he said, handing her the box.

The nurse read the address and the box tremble