When she softly pushed the door open, John was not asleep. He lay in a corner on his low hard bed of skins against the wall of logs-- his eyes wide open, the hard white glare of the small shutter-less window falling on his face. He turned to her the look of a dumb animal that can say nothing of why it has been wounded or of how it is suffering; stretched out his hand gratefully; and drew her toward him. She sat down on the edge of the bed, folded her quivering fingers across his temples, smoothed back his heavy, coarse, curling hair, and bending low over his eyes, rained down into them the whole unuttered, tearless passion of her distress, her sympathy. Major Falconer came for her within the hour and she left with him almost as soon as he arrived. When she was gone, John lay thinking of her. "What a nurse she is!" he said, remembering how she had concerned herself solely his about life, his safety, his wounds. Once she had turned quickly: "Now you can't go away!" she had said with a smile that touched him deeply. "I wish you didn't have to go!" he had replied mourningfully, feeling his sudden dependence on her. This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a glass beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed. "And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of things and with an embarrassed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here are some towels." Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones. When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again. He had gratefully slipped on one of the shirts. He was feeling the new sense of luxury that is imparted by a bed enriched with snow-white, sweet-smelling pillows and sheets. The curtain over his window strained into his room a light shadowy, restful. The flower on his table,--the transforming touch in his room--her noble brooding tenderness--everything went into his gratitude, his remembrance of her. But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified. And by this route he came at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of her childlessness.