"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry." "I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand, careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but he was in reality, she saw, a mass of complexities, of actions and reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character. "I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave." "Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm glad all the same that I was here." She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?" "No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good, you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent, watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and we've got to take them standing." She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least. Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it was all a dream, I should believe you." "Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw you." "It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard, but I can't help it." "Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break." "Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she replied almost bitterly. After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of criticism. A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased. "All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my husband left me for another woman." "The one in there?" She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there." "The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly. "There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street." "And you brought him in?" "What else could I do? He was dying."