Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women.  But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her.  The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.

She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as “Liz” in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse.  Elizabeth always read the tracts.  She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors.  “Liz” had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.

The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed.  “Shall I put one here?” she asked, fingering a tract.

Liz meditated majestically.

“Well, I guess I would,” she said.  “Not that it’ll do any good.”

“Why?”

Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.

“She’s not getting on very well,” she said; “and, even if she gets through, she won’t read the tract.  She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here.  She’s young.  Says she hopes she and the kid’ll both die.”

The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.

“Then she—­isn’t married?” she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.

Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.

“Well, no,” she admitted; “I guess that’s what’s worrying her.  She’s a fool, she is.  She can put the kid in a home.  That’s what I do.  Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble?  Wouldn’t he be always throwing it up to her?”

The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.

“Have—­have you a baby here?” she asked timidly.

“Have I!” said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed.  She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.

“This is mine,” she said airily.  “Funny little mutt, isn’t he?”

The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.

“He—­he’s very little,” she said.

“Little!” said Liz.  “He holds the record here for the last six months—­eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived.  The little devil!”

She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil’s sleeping form.  The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.