After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o'clock she was

always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of

sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color.

Between three and four o'clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty

by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty.

The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night

nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!

Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And

after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn

over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn,

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she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were

stretched taut as a string.

Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very

little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made

frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the

darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the

door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy

movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of

thirst.

The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just a

little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so much

thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned her.

"Don't jump like that, child; they're not parched, you know."

"But if you have a fever and are thirsty--"

"Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody."

"Then," Sidney would say, rising resolutely, "they are going to see me."

Gradually the older girls saw that she would not save herself. They liked

her very much, and they, too, had started in with willing feet and tender

hands; but the thousand and one demands of their service had drained them

dry. They were efficient, cool-headed, quick-thinking machines, doing

their best, of course, but differing from Sidney in that their service was

of the mind, while hers was of the heart. To them, pain was a thing to be

recorded on a report; to Sidney, it was written on the tablets of her soul.

Carlotta Harrison went on night duty at the same time--her last night

service, as it was Sidney's first. She accepted it stoically. She had

charge of the three wards on the floor just below Sidney, and of the ward

into which all emergency cases were taken. It was a difficult service,

perhaps the most difficult in the house. Scarcely a night went by without

its patrol or ambulance case. Ordinarily, the emergency ward had its own

night nurse. But the house was full to overflowing. Belated vacations and

illness had depleted the training-school. Carlotta, given double duty,

merely shrugged her shoulders.




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