“Do you think you could bring him to see her?”

“Say, what do you think I am—­a missionary?” The Nurse was wise, so she kept silent.  “Well, I’ll tell you what I will do.  If I can bring him, I will.  How’s that yellow-haired she-devil you’ve got over there?  I’ve got that fixed all right.  She pulled a razor on me first—­I’ve got witnesses.  Well, if I can get Al, I’ll do it.  So long.”

It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil medium toward a righteous end.  She took life much as she found it.  And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of peau d’Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the children from the children’s ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches, were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes uplifted.

The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday to new hope and new life—­over the Junior Medical, waiting with the manuscript of “The Palms” rolled in his hand and his heart singing a hymn of happiness.

The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel, and, with all her woman’s art, tidied the immaculate white bed and loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair fell across Claribel’s bloodless forehead and softened the defiance in her blue eyes.  She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and placed it on the bedside table.  Then she stood off and looked at her work.  It was good.

Claribel submitted weakly.  She had stopped staring at the wall, and had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange intentness.  Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread she spoke.

“Was it a boy—­or a girl?” she asked.

“Girl,” said the nurse briskly.  “A little beauty, perfect in every way.”

“A girl—­to grow up and go through this hell!” she muttered, and her eyes wandered back to the window.

But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.  She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected Claribel’s without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room down the hall—­which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital rules.

First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of lace and insertion,—­and everybody knows that such a dress is used only when a hospital infant is baptised,—­and she clothed Claribel’s baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum—­to break the shock, as you may say.  It was very probable that Al had never seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of parenthood unnecessarily.  For it really was a fine child, and eventually it would be white and beautiful.