Meantime Sarah lay silent, bitter thoughts moving beneath her white, impassive face like salt tides below a frozen surface. It was a strong, stern face, telling of a present of pain, and faintly hinting at a past of prettiness. She seemed alone in the populated ward, and indeed the world was bare for her. Most of her life had been spent in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she was married at sixteen, nineteen years before. Her only surviving son--a youth whom the English atmosphere had not improved--had sailed away to trade with the Kaffirs. And her husband had not been to see her for a fortnight! When the visitors began to arrive, her torpor vanished. She eagerly raised the half of her that was not paralyzed, partially sitting up. But gradually expectation died out of her large gray eyes. There was a buzz of talk in the room--the hydrocephalous girl was the gay centre of a group; the Polish grandmother who cursed her grandchildren when they didn't come and when they did, was denouncing their neglect of her to their faces; everybody had somebody to kiss or quarrel with. One or two acquaintances approached the bed-ridden wife, too, but she would speak no word, too proud to ask after her husband, and wincing under the significant glances occasionally cast in her direction. By and by she had the red screen placed round her bed, which gave her artificial walls and a quasi-privacy. Her husband would know where to look for her-- "Woe is me!" wailed her centenarian country-woman, rocking to and fro. "What sin have I committed to get such grandchildren? You only come to see if the old grandmother isn't dead yet. So sick! So sick! So sick!" Twilight filled the wards. The white beds looked ghostly in the darkness. The last visitor departed. Sarah's husband had not yet come. "He is not well, Mrs. Kretznow," Sister Margaret ventured to say in her best Yiddish. "Or he is busy working. Work is not so slack any more." Alone in the institution she shared Sarah's ignorance of the Kretznow scandal. Talk of it died before her youth and sweetness. "He would have written," said Sarah sternly. "He is awearied of me. I have lain here a year. Job's curse is on me." "Shall I to him"--Sister Margaret paused to excogitate the Yiddish word--"write?" "No! He hears me knocking at his heart." They had flashes of strange savage poetry, these crude yet complex souls. Sister Margaret, who was still liable to be startled, murmured feebly, "But--" "Leave me in peace!" with a cry like that of a wounded animal. The matron gently touched the novice's arm and drew her away. "_I_ will write to him," she whispered.