he fed him hot milk and
he still lay open-eyed, almost rigid, staring straight at the ceiling. At
midnight she stole out for her own supper in the diet-kitchen and found
him still awake when she returned, the haunting eyes looking more child's
than man's in the dimness of the night lamp. Had she been free to follow
her most vagrant impulse, she would have climbed on the head of the bed,
taken the bandaged head on her lap, and plunged into the most enthralling
tale of boy adventure her imagination could compass. But she hounded off
the impulse, after the fashion of treating all vagrants, and went back to
the window to wait and wonder. Peter was still awake when the gray of the
morning crept down the corridors of the Surgical.

Sheila questioned Tyler, the day nurse, as she came off duty the next
evening, "Number Three sleep any to boast of?"

"Why, no! Didn't he sleep well last night?"

She gave a non-committal shrug and passed into the room. He was watching
for her coming, and a ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his
mouth. She couldn't remember having seen even so much of a smile before.

"It's--it's Leerie." He said it just as he had the night before. But there
was a strange, wistful appeal in the voice which set Sheila wondering
afresh.

"Gorgeous night, full of stars, and air like wine. Smell the verbena and
thyme from the San gardens?" Sheila threw back her head and sniffed the
air like a wild thing. "Took me a month to trail that smell--be sure of
it. You only get it at night after a light rain. Take some long breaths of
it and you'll be asleep before lights are out."

But he was not. He lay rigid as the night before, his eyes staring
straight before him. Sheila remembered a description she had read once of
a mountain guide who had been caught on the edge of a landslide and hung
for hours over the abyss, clutching a half-felled tree and trying to keep
awake until help came. The man she was nursing might almost be living
through such an agony of mind and body, afraid to yield up his
consciousness lest he should go plunging off into some horrible abyss.
What did he fear? Was it sleep? Was somnophobia what lay behind the
wrecking of this fine, clean manhood? The thing seemed incredible, and
yet--and yet--

Before dawn crept again into the Surgical, the mind of Sheila O'Leary was
made up. Peter was suddenly aware that the nurse was close at his bedside,
chafing the clenched fingers free. It was that m