He turned as he spoke to walk with her, and what could Agnes do? She could not refuse to answer him, or show any prudery. He evidently (she said to herself) thought nothing of it; why should she appear to demur to anything so simple? Give a report about a suffering child? Anyone might do that--to anyone. And she told him that Emmy was making satisfactory progress, though she had been feverish and ill. ‘I was a little frightened, though the nurse said it was nothing. She wandered, and spoke so strangely for a little while. Poor little Emmy! She had a beautiful dream, and thought herself in heaven.’ ‘While you were there?’ said Oswald, with a significance in the simple question which covered her face with a sudden blush. Then she blushed deeper still to think what foolish, unpardonable vanity this was--vanity the most extraordinary, the most silly! What he meant, _of course_, was a simple question, most natural--an inquiry about a fact, not any wicked compliment. How Agnes hated and despised herself for the warm suffusion of shy pleasure which she had felt in her heart and on her face! ‘Yes,’ she said, demurely; ‘but she soon roused up and came quite to herself. She had been in great pain, and they had given her something to deaden it, that was all.’ ‘I quite understand,’ he said, with again that appearance of meaning more than he said. No doubt it was merely his way; and it was embarrassing, but not so disagreeable as perhaps it ought to have been. Agnes kept her head down, and slightly turned away, so that this stranger could not see the inappropriate blushes which came and went under the bonnet of the Sisterhood. Then there was a pause; and she wondered within herself whether it would be best to turn down a cross-street and feign an errand, which would take her out of the straight road to the ‘House’--evidently that was _his_ way--and by this means she might escape his close attendance. But then, to invent a fictitious errand would be unquestionably wrong; whereas, to allow a gentleman whom she did not know to walk along the public pavement, to which everybody had an equal right, by her side, was only problematically wrong. Thus Agnes hesitated, in a flutter, between two courses. So long as they were not talking it seemed more simple that he should be walking the same way. ‘What a strange world a hospital must be,’ he said. ‘I have been watching the people coming out’ (‘Then he was not late, after all,’ Agnes remarked to herself), ‘some of them pleased, some anxious, but the most part indifferent. Indifference always carries the day. Is that why the world goes on so steadily, whatever happens? Here and there is one who shows some feeling----’ ‘It is because the greater part of the patients are not very ill,’ said Agnes, responding instantly to this challenge. ‘Oh, no, people are not indifferent. I know that is what is said--that we eat our dinners in spite of everything----’