in from the Avenue.
She had taken a poison--nobody knew just what. When the internes had
tried to find out, she had only said: "What's the use?"

And she had died.

Sidney kept asking herself, "Why?" those mornings when she could not get
to sleep. People were kind--men were kind, really,--and yet, for some
reason or other, those things had to be. Why?

After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o'clock she was
always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of
sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color.
Between three and four o'clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on
duty by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on
duty. The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding.
The night nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!

Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And
after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of
dawn over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward
dawn, she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves
were stretched taut as a string.

Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat
very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her;
she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish;
the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near
the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy
movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of
thirst.

The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just
a little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so
much thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned
her.

"Don't jump like that, child; they're not parched, you know."

"But if you have a fever and are thirsty--"

"Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody."

"Then," Sidney would say, rising resolutely, "they are going to see me."

Gradually the older girls saw that she would not save herself. They
liked her very much, and they, too, had started in with willing feet
and tender hands; but the thousand and one demands of their service
had drained them dry. They were efficient, cool-headed, quick-thinking
machines, doing their best, of course, but differing from Sidney in that
their service was of the mind, while h