It was after Sidney had crept like a broken thing to her room that Carlotta Harrison and K. came face to face. Johnny was quite conscious by that time, a little blue around the lips, but valiantly cheerful.
“More things can happen to a fellow than I ever knew there was!” he said to his mother, and submitted rather sheepishly to her tears and caresses.
“You were always a good boy, Johnny,” she said. “Just you get well enough to come home. I'll take care of you the rest of my life. We will get you a wheel-chair when you can be about, and I can take you out in the park when I come from work.”
“I'll be passenger and you'll be chauffeur, ma.”
“Mr. Le Moyne is going to get your father sent up again. With sixty-five cents a day and what I make, we'll get along.”
“Oh, Johnny, if I could see you coming in the door again and yelling 'mother' and 'supper' in one breath!”
The meeting between Carlotta and Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually knew her.
When the preparations for moving Johnny back to the big ward had been made, the other nurses left the room, and Carlotta and the boy were together. K. stopped her on her way to the door.
“I am not Dr. Edwardes here; my name is Le Moyne.”
“I have not seen you since you left St. John's.”
“I suppose they do not know that you were--that you have had any previous hospital experience.”
And thus, by simple mutual consent, it was arranged that each should respect the other's confidence.
Carlotta staggered to her room. There had been a time, just before dawn, when she had had one of those swift revelations that sometimes come at the end of a long night. She had seen herself as she was. The boy was very low, hardly breathing. Her past stretched behind her, a series of small revenges and passionate outbursts, swift yieldings, slow remorse. She dared not look ahead. She would have given every hope she had in the world, just then, for Sidney's stainless past.
She hated herself with that deadliest loathing that comes of complete self-revelation.
And she carried to her room the knowledge that the night's struggle had been in vain--that, although Johnny Rosenfeld would live, she had gained nothing by what he had suffered. The whole night had shown her the hopelessness of any stratagem to win Wilson from his new allegiance. She had surprised him in the hallway, watching Sidney's slender figure as she made her way up the stairs to her room. Never, in all his past overtures to her, had she seen that look in his eyes.