As Elizabeth and Gusta entered the hospital they shuddered, and drew close to each other like sisters. Koerner was in the marine ward, and Gusta dreaded the place. On her previous visits there, the nurses had been sharp and severe with her, but this morning, when the nurses saw Elizabeth bearing her basket of fruit and her flowers--which she would not let Gusta carry, feeling that would rob her offering of the personal quality she wished it to assume--they ran forward, their starched, striped blue skirts rustling, and greeted her with smiles. "Why, Miss Ward!" they cried. "Good morning," said Elizabeth, "we’ve come to see Mr. Koerner." "Oh, yes," said Koerner’s nurse, a tall, spare young woman with a large nose, eye-glasses, and a flat chest. "He’s so much better this morning." She said this with a patronizing glance aside at Gusta, who tried to smile; the nurse had not spoken so pleasantly to her before. The nurse led the girls into the ward, and they passed down between the rows of white cots. Some of the cots were empty, their white sheets folded severely, back, awaiting the return of their occupants from the rooms up-stairs. In the others men sprawled, with pallid, haggard faces, and watched the young women as they passed along, following them with large, brilliant, sick eyes. But Elizabeth and Gusta did not look at them; they kept their eyes before them. One bed had a white screen about it; candles glowed through the screen, silhouetting the bending forms of a priest, a doctor and a nurse. Koerner was at the end of the ward. His great, gaunt, heavy figure was supine on the bed; the bandaged stump of his leg made a heavy bulk under the counterpane; his broad shoulders mashed down the pillow; his enormous hands, still showing in their cracks and crevices and around the cuticle of his broken nails the grime that all the antiseptic scrubbings of a hospital could not remove, lay outside the coverlid, idle for the first time in half a century. His white hair was combed, its ragged edges showing more obviously, and his gaunt cheeks were covered by a stubble of frosty beard. His blue eyes were unnaturally bright. Elizabeth fell back a little that Gusta might greet him first, and the strong, lusty, healthy girl bent over her father and laid one hand on his. "Well, pa, how’re you feeling to-day?" "Hullo, Gustie," said the old man, "you gom’ again, huh? Vell, der oldt man’s pretty bad, I tel’ you." "Why, the nurse said you were better." "Why, yes," said the nurse, stepping forward with a professional smile, "he’s lots better this morning; he just won’t admit it, that’s all. But we know him here, we do!" She said this playfully, with a lateral addition to her smile, and she bent over and passed her hand under the bed-clothes and touched his bandages here and there. Elizabeth and Gusta stood looking on. "Isn’t the pain any better?" asked the nurse, still smilingly, coaxingly.