We placed them in adjoining rooms, and, as
often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that they could call out
to one another.
"Poor things! They were little else than boy and girl, and they worried
more about each other than they thought about themselves. The wife's
only trouble was that she wouldn't be able to do anything for 'poor
Jack.' 'Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won't you?' she would cry,
with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment I went in to him
it would be: 'Oh, don't trouble about me, nurse, I'm all right. Just
look after the wifie, will you?'
"I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her
sister, I was nursing them both. It was an unprofessional thing to do,
but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the doctor that I
could manage. To me it was worth while going through the double work
just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two
sick-rooms. The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people
imagine. It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we
live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in. It gave me a new heart,
nursing these young people.
"The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was
a wee slip of a girl, and her strength--what there was of it--ebbed day
by day.
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