She watched that bared arm, her breath held. The long square fingers closed once more with a firm grip on the instrument. "Miss Lemoris, some No. 3 gauze." Then not a sound until the thing was done, and the surgeon had turned away to cleanse his hands in the bowl of purple antiseptic wash. "My!" the head nurse exclaimed, "Dr. Trip ain't in it." But the surgeon's face wore a preoccupied, sombre look, irresponsive to the nurse's admiration. While she helped the interne with the complicated dressing, the little nurse made ready for removal to the ward. Then when one of the ward tenders had wheeled the muffled figure into the corridor, she hurried across to the office. "It's all over," she whispered blithely to the wife, who sat in a dull abstraction, oblivious of the hospital flurry. "And it's going to be all right, I just know. Dr. Sommers is _so_ clever, he'd save a dead man. You had better go now. No use to see him to-night, for he won't come out of the opiate until near morning. You can come tomorrow morning, and p'r'aps Dr. Sommers will get you a pass in. Visitors only Thursdays and Sunday afternoons usually." She hurried off to her duties in the ward. The woman did not rise at once. She did not readjust her thoughts readily; she seemed to be waiting in the chance of seeing some one. The surgeon did not come out of the receiving room; there was a sound of wheels in the corridor just outside the office door, followed by the sound of shuffling feet. Through the open door she could see two attendants wheeling a stretcher with a man lying motionless upon it. They waited in the hall outside under a gas-jet, which cast a flickering light upon the outstretched form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,--a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to another case. As she passed the stretcher, the bearers shifted their burden to give her room. The form on the stretcher moaned indistinctly. She looked at the unsightly mass, in her heart envious of his condition. There were things in this world much more evil than this bruised flesh of what had once been a human being. CHAPTER II