n; then she and the husband
looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged
suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had
not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and
night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and
that--she could hardly have told how.

"_Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!_" said the husband, rising and shaking
himself. He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race,
a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter. Yet,
after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of
perspiration.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,"
said Marcella.

The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the
nurse.

"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will not leaf me alone?"

Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.

"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.
You had better go to bed."

It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he was in
truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay down
with the children.

Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her
patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her--the heavy breaths
of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the
sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the
crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances
for pulling the woman through--for it was what a nurse calls "a good
case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty--partly on the
extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and
mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman's
illness; and partly--in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought--on
the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in
this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother
and her child!

The year in hospital had _rushed_--dreamless sleep by night, exhausting
fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her work _seizes_
her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself. Now, for some
six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse,
under the control of a central office and superintendent. Her work lay
in the homes of the poor, and was of the