The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour
when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.

It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
they long for it.

In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
inclination to mutiny.

"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
eyebrows.

"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.

For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.

"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,