She had lain here three weeks with a hurt thigh-bone bruised, but luckily not splintered, by the kick of a performing pony.
The ward reeked of yellow soap and iodoform.

She would have exchanged these odours at the price of her soul--but souls are not vendible, and besides she did not know she possessed one--for the familiar redolences of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf.

These were far away: they had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams.
What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a steam-organ many streets away.

It belonged to a roundabout, and regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled with the buzz of a fly on the window and with the hard breathing of the sick woman.
Sick persons must be amused: and Tilda, after trying the patient unsuccessfully with a few jokes from the _repertoire_ of her own favourite clown, had fallen back upon "I love my love"-- about the only game known to her that dispensed with physical exertion.
"Sleepin', are you?
.

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