And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless others would come sooner or later.  She was not unconscious and at Delia’s cry she opened her eyes.  The Probationer was off filling water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered, unlovely, stood beside her.

“Rotten luck, old top!” she said faintly.

To the Dummy it was a benediction.  She could open her eyes.  The miracle of speech was still hers.

“Cigarette!” explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on her.  “Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it.  I’m—­all in!”

“Don’t you talk like that,” said Irish Delia, bending over from the next bed.  “You’ll get well a’ right—­unless you inhaled.  Y’ought to ‘a’ kept your mouth shut.”

Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed.  Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.

“Humph!” she said, without troubling to lower her voice.  “I’ve seen her often.  I done her washing once.  She’s as bad as they make ’em.”

“You shut your mouth!” Irish Delia rose to the defence.  “She’s in trouble now and what she was don’t matter.  You go back to bed or I’ll tell the Head Nurse on you.  Look out!  The Dummy——­”

The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes.  As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed.  Old Maggie reeled—­almost fell.

“You all seen that!” she appealed to the ward.  “I haven’t even spoke to him and he attacked me!  I’ll go to the superintendent about it.  I’ll——­”

The Probationer hurried in.  Her young cheeks were flushed with excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels, bandages—­anything she could imagine as essential.  She found the Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in order—­only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed; and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining—­for had not the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about the new girl?  Had she not said that he knew many things that were hidden, though God knows how he knew them?

The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal.  Her burns were dressed by an interne and she was moved back to a bed at the end of the ward.  The Probationer sat beside her, having refused supper.  The Dummy was gone—­the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as one shoos a chicken.

“Get out of here!  You’re always under my feet,” she had said—­not unkindly—­and pointed to the door.

The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had not moved.  The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the emergency bed and clear away the dressings—­the Senior tried diplomacy and offered him an orange from her own corner of the medicine closet.  He shook his head.