“You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,” said Marcella.

The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the nurse.

“You will not go away, mees,” he implored, “you will not leaf me alone?”

Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.

“No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.  You had better go to bed.”

It was close on three o’clock.  The man demurred a little, but he was in truth too worn out to resist.  He went into the back room and lay down with the children.

Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her patient.  Her quick ear caught every sound about her—­the heavy breaths of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the crowded house.  Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances for pulling the woman through—­for it was what a nurse calls “a good case,” one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty—­partly on the extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman’s illness; and partly—­in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought—­on the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother and her child!

The year in hospital had rushed—­dreamless sleep by night, exhausting fatigue of mind and body by day.  A hospital nurse, if her work seizes her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself.  Now, for some six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse, under the control of a central office and superintendent.  Her work lay in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind.  The life was freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.

* * * * *

But now the night was over.  The husband had gone off to work at a factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.

When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.

“Well, Benny!” she said as she entered, “how have you got on?”

“Yer can’t move the dirt on them boards with sweepin’,” said Benny, looking at them with disgust; “an’ I ain’t a goin’ to try it no more.”

“You’re about right there, Benny,” said Marcella, mournfully, as she inspected them; “well, we’ll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub—­as soon as your mother can bear it.”