turned the night-light out and lowered the curtain until it was quite dark. Then she drew her chair close to the bed and slipped her hand into the lean, clenched one on the coverlid. “Don’t think of me as a girl—a nurse—a person—at all, to-night,” she said, softly. “I’m just a piece of Stevenson’s poem come to life—a lamplighter for a little boy going to sleep all alone in a farm-house attic. It’s very dark. You can hear the mice squeal and the rafters creak, if you listen, and the window’s so small the stars[Pg 32] can’t creep in. In the daytime the attic doesn’t seem far away or very strange, but at night it’s miles—miles away from the rest of the house, and it’s full of things that may happen. That’s why I’m here with my lamp.”

[Pg 32]

Sheila stopped a moment. She could hear the man’s breath coming quick, with a catch in it—a child breathes that way when it is fighting down a cry or a sob. Then she went on: “Of course it’s a magical lamp I carry, and with the first sputter and spark it lights up and turns the attic inside out—and there we are, the little boy and I, hand in hand, running straight for the brook back of the house. The lamp burns as bright as the sun now, so it seems like day—a spring day. It isn’t the mice squealing at all that you hear, but the birds singing and the brook running. There are cowslips down by the brook, and ‘Jacks.’ Here by the big stone is a chance to build a bully good dam and sailboats made out of the shingles blown off from the barn roof. Want to stop and build it now?”

“All right.” There was almost a suppressed laugh in the voice; it certainly[Pg 33] sounded glad. And the hand on the coverlid was as relaxed as that of a child being led somewhere it wants to go.

[Pg 33]

Sheila smiled happily in the dark: “You must get stones, then—lots and lots of them—and we’ll pile them together. There’s one stone—and two stones—and three stones. Another stone here—another here—another here—a big one there where the current runs swiftest, and little stones for the chinks.”

According to Sheila O’Leary’s best reckoning the dam was only half built when the little boy fell fast asleep over his work. And when the gray of the morning stole down the corridors of the Surgical, No. 3 was sleeping, with one arm thrown over his head as little boys sleep, and the other holding fast to the nurse on night duty.

But it takes a long while to break down an old habit and build up a new one, as it takes a long while 

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