and had rushed into rollicking, joyous music.
The ward echoed with it. "I'm twenty-one and she's eighteen," hummed the
ward under its breath. Miss Wardwell's thin body swayed.

"Lord, how I'd like to dance! If I ever get out of this charnel-house!"

The medicine-tray lay at Carlotta's elbow; beside it the box of labels.
This crude girl was right--right. Carlotta knew it down to the depths of
her tortured brain. As inevitably as the night followed the day, she was
losing her game. She had lost already, unless--

If she could get Sidney out of the hospital, it would simplify things.
She surmised shrewdly that on the Street their interests were wide
apart. It was here that they met on common ground.

The lame violin-player limped out of the ward; the shadows of the
early winter twilight settled down. At five o'clock Carlotta sent Miss
Wardwell to first supper, to the surprise of that seldom surprised
person. The ward lay still or shuffled abut quietly. Christmas was over,
and there were no evening papers to look forward to.

Carlotta gave the five-o'clock medicines. Then she sat down at the table
near the door, with the tray in front of her. There are certain thoughts
that are at first functions of the brain; after a long time the spinal
cord takes them up and converts them into acts almost automatically.
Perhaps because for the last month she had done the thing so often in
her mind, its actual performance was almost without conscious thought.

Carlotta took a bottle from her medicine cupboard, and, writing a new
label for it, pasted it over the old one. Then she exchanged it for one
of the same size on the medicine tray.

In the dining-room, at the probationers' table, Miss Wardwell was
talking.

"Believe me," she said, "me for the country and the simple life after
this. They think I'm only a probationer and don't see anything, but I've
got eyes in my head. Harrison is stark crazy over Dr. Wilson, and she
thinks I don't see it. But never mind; I paid, her up to-day for a few
of the jolts she has given me."

Throughout the dining-room busy and competent young women came and ate,
hastily or leisurely as their opportunity was, and went on their way
again. In their hands they held the keys, not always of life and death
perhaps, but of ease from pain, of tenderness, of smooth pillows, and
cups of water to thirsty lips. In their eyes, as in Sidney's, burned the
light of service.

But here and there one found women,