A good-natured probationer,
who sympathised with me in my difficulties (she too had suffered),
counted them also. A convalescent patient interested himself in the
problem: he also went the round of the beds, and investigated the
cupboard, counting all the pillow-cases. We three each arrived at the
same total. Armed with this total I marched back to the sergeant in the
Clean Linen Store.
He turned up his ledger and ran his finger down the page till he came
to the entry of pillow-cases opposite to my ward. And then he laughed a
laugh of fiendish glee.
"Do you know," he said, "that instead of having three pillow-cases too
few, you've seven too many!"
Such are the traps set by the business man, the expert of ledgers, for
the innocent amateur. We had actually got more pillow-cases than we were
entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had
published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her
ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse
mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all
along.
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