Hennessy was feeding the swans. Sheila O’Leary leaned over the sill of the diminutive rustic rest-house and watched him with a tired contentment. She had just come off a neurasthenic case—a week of twenty-four-hour duty—and she wanted to stretch her cramped sensibilities in the quiet peace of the little house and invite her soul with a glimpse of Hennessy and the swans.

Hennessy

All about her the grounds of the sanitarium were astir with its customary crowd of early-summer-afternoon patients. How those first warm days called the sick folks out-of-doors and held them there until the last beam of sunshine had disappeared behind the foremost hill! The tennis-courts were full; the golf-links were dotted about with spots of color like a cubist picture; pairs of probationers, arm in arm, were strolling about, enjoying a comparative leisure; old Madam[Pg 41] Courot was at her customary place under the juniper, watching the sun go down. Three years! Nothing seemed changed in all that time but the patients—and not all of these, as Madame Courot silently testified. The pines shook themselves above the rest-house in the same lazy, vagabond fashion, the sun purpled the far hills and spun the same yellow haze over the links, the wind brought its habitual afternoon accompaniment of cow-bells from the sanitarium farm, and Hennessy threw the last crumb of bread to Brian Boru, the gray swan, as he had done for the fifteen years Sheila could remember.

[Pg 41]

She folded her arms across the sill and rested her chin on them. How good it was to be back at the old San, to settle down to its kindly, comfortable ways and the peace of its setting after the feverish restlessness of city hospitals! She remembered what Kipling had said, that the hill people who came down to the plains were always hungering to get back to the hills again. That was the way she had felt about it—always a hunger to come back. For months and months she had thought that she might forever have to stay in those hospitals, have to make up her mind[Pg 42] to the eternal plains—and then had come her reprieve—she had been called back to the San and the work she loved best.

[Pg 42]

Had the place been any other than the sanitarium, and the person any other than Sheila O’Leary, this would never have happened. For she had left under a cloud, and in similar cases a cloud, once gathered, grows until it envelops, suffocates, and finally annihilates the person. As a graduate nurse she would have ceased to exist. But in spite of 

 Prev. P 20/147 next