She had been brought in, three nights ago, drenched, bedraggled, chattering in a high fever; a case of acute pneumonia.

Her delirium had kept Tilda--who was preternaturally sharp for her nine years--awake and curious during the better part of two night-watches.

Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly conscious.

In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and found her again and rested on her.
Tilda, meeting that look, had done her best.

The code of the show-folk, to whom she belonged, ruled that persons in trouble were to be helped.
Moreover, the long whitewashed ward, with its seven oblong windows set high in the wall--the smell of it, the solitude, the silence--bored her inexpressibly.