“Perhaps you would rather remain quietly for a few days, Miss Heron?” she suggested, sweetly.

Ida’s eyes—­they looked preternaturally large, violet orbs in her white face—­beamed gratefully.

“Oh, yes, yes! if I may.  Shall I be ill long?—­how soon will it be before I can go?”

It is about as difficult to get a definite answer from a nurse as from a doctor.

“Oh, some days yet,” replied the sister, cheerfully.  “You must not go until you are quite strong; in fact, we should not let you.  Now you lie quite still and try and sleep again if you can; and you can think over whether you would like to communicate with your friends or not.  If you ask my advice, I shall say, like Mr. Punch, ‘Don’t!’”

“I won’t,” said Ida, with her rare smile.

The sister nodded and left her, and Ida closed her eyes again:  but not to sleep.  She recalled her flight from Laburnum Villa, her wandering through the streets, the crowded and noisy quay, and the strange hallucination, the vision of Stafford standing on the stern of the vessel.  Of course, it was only a vision, an hallucination; but how real it had seemed!  So real that it was almost difficult to believe that it was not he himself.  She smiled sadly at the thought of Stafford, the son of the great Sir Stephen Orme, sailing in a cattle-ship!

The hours passed in a kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; and on the second day after her return to consciousness, began a conversation with her next-door neighbour, a pleasant-looking woman who had eyed her wistfully several times, but who had been too shy to address “the young lady.”  She was a country woman from Dorsetshire—­up to London on a visit “to my daughter, miss, which is married to a man as keeps a dairy.”  It was her first visit to London; she had wandered from her daughter’s lost her, and, in her confusion, tumbled down the cellar of a beer-shop.  She told Ida the history of some of the other cases, and Ida found herself listening with an interest which astonished her.

Nurse Brown, seeing the two talking, nodded approvingly.

“That’s right,” she said, with a smile.  “You keep each other company.  It passes the time away.”

Very soon, Ida found herself taking an interest in everything that went on, in the noiseless movements of the nurses, in the arrival of a new case, in the visit of the doctors and the chaplain, and the friends of the other patients.  Let the pessimists say what they may, there is a lot of good in human nature; and it comes out quite startlingly in the ward of a hospital.  Ida was amazed at the care and attention, the patience and the devotion which were lavished on herself and her fellow-sufferers; a devotion which no money can buy, and which could not have been exceeded if they had one and all been princesses of the blood royal.