But, because discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the assistant carried around: “Please submit night reports in prose.” Sidney did not sleep much. She tumbled into her low bed at nine o'clock in the morning, those days, with her splendid hair neatly braided down her back and her prayers said, and immediately her active young mind filled with images--Christine's wedding, Dr. Max passing the door of her old ward and she not there, Joe--even Tillie, whose story was now the sensation of the Street. A few months before she would not have cared to think of Tillie. She would have retired her into the land of things-one-must-forget. But the Street's conventions were not holding Sidney's thoughts now. She puzzled over Tillie a great deal, and over Grace and her kind. On her first night on duty, a girl had been brought in from the Avenue. She had taken a poison--nobody knew just what. When the internes had tried to find out, she had only said: “What's the use?” And she had died. Sidney kept asking herself, “Why?” those mornings when she could not get to sleep. People were kind--men were kind, really,--and yet, for some reason or other, those things had to be. Why? After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o'clock she was always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color. Between three and four o'clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty. The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him! Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn, she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were stretched taut as a string. Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of thirst. The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just a little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so much thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned her. “Don't jump like that, child; they're not parched, you know.” “But if you have a fever and are thirsty--” “Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody.” “Then,” Sidney would say, rising resolutely, “they are going to see me.”