So, her cool smooth hand resting lightly over his, where it lay on the sheets, she listened to the home-sick man until it was time to give another sufferer his swallow of lemonade.
Later she put on a gingham overgown, sprinkled it and her hands with camphor, and went into the outer wards where the isolated patients lay--where hospital gangrene and erysipelas were the horrors.

And, farther on, she entered the outlying wing devoted to typhus.

In spite of the open windows the atmosphere was heavy; everywhere the air seemed weighted with the odour of decay.
As always, in spite of herself, she hesitated at the door.

But the steward on duty rose; and she took his candle and entered the place of death.
Toward morning a Rhode Island artilleryman, dying in great pain, relapsed into coma.

Waiting beside him, she wrote to his parents, enclosing the little keepsakes he had designated when conscious, while his life flickered with the flickering candle.