Polly was singing.  Clear and steady and sweet, her voice rang over the quiet ward, and many a fevered face was raised to listen.  Polly’s mind was wandering in the shadows, but she still sang the songs of home in a strange land: 

   Down by the biller there grew a green willer
   A weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

And over and over again she sang with a wavering cadence, incoherently sometimes, but always with tender pleading, something about “where the stream was a-flowin’, the gentle kine lowin’, and over my grave keep the green willers growin’.”

“It is pathetic to hear her,” the nurse said, “and now listen to her asking about her poppies.”

“In the box, miss; I brought the seed hacross the hocean, and they wuz beauties, they wuz wot came hup.  They’ll be noddin’ and wavin’ now red and ’andsome, if she hasn’t cut them.  She wouldn’t cut them, would she, miss?  She couldn’t ’ave the ’eart, I think.”

“No indeed, she hasn’t cut them,” the nurse declared with decision, taking Polly’s burning hand tenderly in hers.  “No one could cut down such beauties.  What nonsense to think of such a thing, Polly.  They’re blooming, I tell you, red and handsome, almost as tall as you are, Polly.”

The office-boy touched the nurse’s arm.

“A gentleman who gave no name left this box for one of the typhoid patients,” he said, handing her the box.

The nurse read the address and the box trembled in her hands as she nervously opened it and took out the contents.

“Polly, Polly!” she cried, excitedly, “didn’t I tell you they were blooming, red and handsome.”

But Polly’s eyes were burning with delirium and her lips babbled meaninglessly.

The nurse held the poppies over her.

Her arms reached out caressingly.

“Oh, miss!” she cried, her mind coming back from the shadows.  “They have come at last, the darlin’s, the sweethearts, the loves, the beauties.”  She held them in a close embrace.  “They’re from ’ome, they’re from ’ome!” she gasped painfully, for her breath came with difficulty now.  “I can’t just see them, miss, the lights is movin’ so much, and the way the bed ’eaves, but, tell me, miss, is there a little silky one, hedged with w’ite?  It was mother’s favourite one of hall.  I’d like to ’ave it in my ’and, miss.”

The nurse put it in her hand.  She was only a young nurse and her face was wet with tears.

“It’s like ‘avin’ my mother’s ’and, miss, it is,” she murmured softly.  “Ye wouldn’t mind the dark if ye ’ad yer mother’s ’and, would ye, miss?”

And then the nurse took Polly’s throbbing head in her strong young arms, and soothed its restless tossing with her cool soft touch, and told her through her tears of that other Friend, who would go with her all the way.

“I’m that ’appy, miss,” Polly murmured faintly.  “It’s like I was goin’ ’ome.  Say that again about the valley,” and the nurse repeated tenderly that promise of incomparable sweetness: