Sister Mary smiled gently, tolerantly. 'I think generally. We always sterilise _our_ milk in hospital, you know. As Grace Arbuthnot shook hands with the doctor, who came up at that moment, she was conscious of a confused quotation trying to formulate itself at the back of her brain, about closing doors when steeds are stolen, and sterilising seeds when they have been sown. The doctor's kind eyes, however, drove the thought away; for they were eyes which seemed to see the nightmare, hidden under all the care and the comfort, more clearly than Sister Mary's; though hers were kind to the uttermost also--kind and quick--so that, as she passed down the row of beds with the visitors, she left the other sisters and the orderlies busy. And more than once her eyes and the doctor's--the woman's and the man's--met, after looking at a boy's face, with regret or relief in them. But no one said a word of better or worse, except now and again a wistful voice from the beds that stood so close together. 'What young faces!' said Grace in an undertone; there was a constriction in her throat which might have prevented her speaking loud had she wished to do so. 'I doubt if there is a case over two-and-twenty in the ward,' replied Dr. Sullivan, 'except'--he paused beside a cot in the far corner, where a nurse sate at the head and an orderly waited at the foot--'except this one.' He spoke without any attempt at an aside, for the face staring up with open eyes at the ceiling was unmistakably unconscious; yet, even so, curiously haggard, weary, anxious. 'He is a hospital orderly,' went on the doctor, 'the best nurse I ever came across. I wonder how many fellows he's pulled through in his fifteen years of it. But it has got him at last, though he was careful. In a hurry possibly, and didn't disinfect; there's been a terrible rush lately, and very little will do it. Poor old Steady Normal!' He laid his hand regretfully on the anxious forehead for an instant, and the expression on his face was mirrored in those around him. 'They called him that, Lady Arbuthnot,' he explained, 'because he used to beam all over when he could echo that report. Well, if anybody pulls through, he ought to, in justice; but it's a bad case. You see, he is saturated with the poison.' So on and on they passed, down one side and up the other, pausing by each bed to look at what lay there, and compare it with the chart which Sister Mary unhooked from the wall and handed to the doctor. It got on Grace Arbuthnot's nerves at last--the methodical calm of it all, the smiles that were so cheerfully sympathetic or so wistfully impatient, the studious speech, the still more studious silence. Until at last, when the end was near, and Dr. Sullivan's finger, travelling over a chart, pointed out a level after a series of peaks and passes, she could not help seeking relief in the remark that 'some one was out of the wood!'