The hands of the little watch pointed to eight-thirty when at last she lay quiet, with closed eyes. Sidney, tiptoeing to the door, was brought up short by her name again, this time in a more normal voice:—
“Sidney.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Perhaps you are right and I’m going to get over this.”
“Certainly you are. Your nerves are playing tricks with you tonight.”
“I’ll tell you now why I sent for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“If—if I get very bad,—you know what I mean,—will you promise to do exactly what I tell you?”
“I promise, absolutely.”
“My trunk key is in my pocket-book. There is a letter in the tray—just a name, no address on it. Promise to see that it is not delivered; that it is destroyed without being read.”
Sidney promised promptly; and, because it was too late now for her meeting with Wilson, for the next hour she devoted herself to making Carlotta comfortable. So long as she was busy, a sort of exaltation of service upheld her. But when at last the night assistant came to sit with the sick girl, and Sidney was free, all the life faded from her face. He had waited for her and she had not come. Would he understand? Would he ask her to meet him again? Perhaps, after all, his question had not been what she had thought.
She went miserably to bed. K.‘s little watch ticked under her pillow. Her stiff cap moved in the breeze as it swung from the corner of her mirror. Under her window passed and repassed the night life of the city—taxicabs, stealthy painted women, tired office-cleaners trudging home at midnight, a city patrol-wagon which rolled in through the gates to the hospital’s always open door. When she could not sleep, she got up and padded to the window in bare feet. The light from a passing machine showed a youthful figure that looked like Joe Drummond.
Life, that had always seemed so simple, was growing very complicated for Sidney: Joe and K., Palmer and Christine, Johnny Rosenfeld, Carlotta—either lonely or tragic, all of them, or both. Life in the raw.
Toward morning Carlotta wakened. The night assistant was still there. It had been a quiet night and she was asleep in her chair. To save her cap she had taken it off, and early streaks of silver showed in her hair.
Carlotta roused her ruthlessly.
“I want something from my trunk,” she said.
The assistant wakened reluctantly, and looked at her watch. Almost morning. She yawned and pinned on her cap.
“For Heaven’s sake,” she protested. “You don’t want me to go to the trunk-room at this hour!”
“I can go myself,” said Carlotta, and put her feet out of bed.
“What is it you want?”
“A letter on the top tray. If I wait my temperature will go up and I can’t think.”
“Shall I mail it for you?”
“Bring it here,” said Carlotta shortly. “I want to destroy it.”
The young woman went without haste, to show that a night assistant may do such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was filling out records.
“Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like Carlotta Harrison!” she complained. “I’ve got to go to the trunk-room for her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!”
As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room, Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand. The night assistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.
“Why don’t you let me do it?” she asked irritably.
Carlotta did not reply at once. The candle was in her hand, and she was staring at the letter.
“Because I want to do it myself,” she said at last, and thrust the envelope into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening, destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta speak again. Then:—
“If every fool of a woman who wrote a letter burnt it, there would be less trouble in the world,” she said, and lay back among her pillows.
The assistant said nothing. She was sleepy and irritated, and she had crushed her best cap by letting the lid of Carlotta’s trunk fall on her. She went out of the room with disapproval in every line of her back.
“She burned it,” she informed the night nurse at her desk. “A letter to a man—one of her suitors, I suppose. The name was K. Le Moyne.”
The deepening and broadening of Sidney’s character had been very noticeable in the last few months. She had gained in decision without becoming hard; had learned to see things as they are, not through the rose mist of early girlhood; and, far from being daunted, had developed a philosophy that had for its basis God in His heaven and all well with the world.
But her new theory of acceptance did not comprehend everything. She was in a state of wild revolt, for instance, as to Johnny Rosenfeld, and more remotely but not less deeply concerned over Grace Irving. Soon she was to learn of Tillie’s predicament, and to take up the cudgels valiantly for her.
But her revolt was to be for herself too. On the day after her failure to keep her appointment with Wilson she
