Flash and Filigree Read Free Page B

understand? I have a pain in my head. Would you please tell me where Dr. Frederick Eichner is?”
    Miss Mintner drew herself up. “Dr. Eichner has gone home,” she said imperiously. “He left full instructions about you, and if you will just lie quietly until the ward-boy comes from the Dispensary with something to make you feel a lot better . . .”
    “Gone home !” cried Treevly bolting upright. “What do you mean gone home? What time is it?” He got to his feet unsteadily, warding her off with his hand. “What time is it?” he demanded.
    “Listen,” said Miss Mintner in an outraged girlish threat, “I told you . . .”
    “What time is it!” Mr. Treevly shouted.
    Miss Mintner’s face grew scarlet; she looked as if she were going to burst. Then she turned on her heel and walked straight to the door. “All right! All right, if you won’t co-operate . . . then do what you want to!” She flung open the door and turned to face him, her great eyes terrible now, blinded with tears and rage. “Goddamn you!” she said and slammed the door behind her.
    In the hall however, standing with the door behind her, she dropped her face in her hands. Her slight shoulders bunched and shaking with dry sobs, she leaned back against the door. Then, an extraordinary thing happened. The door, although she had violently slammed it shut behind her, had failed to catch, and had, in fact, by the force of the slamming, rebounded to a quarter-open position; so that the girl now, having already through sightless anguish improperly reckoned the distance between herself and the door, came tumbling backward into the day-room.
    Mr. Treevly, standing by the couch in a wild daze, his fingers frozen half run through his thin hair, looked on at once in disbelief and then in something rising to savage reproach.
    “What’s going on!” he demanded. “What’s up!”
    But Miss Mintner, crying now as if her heart would really break, sprang out of the room without a word, clutching at her skirt with one hand as she went, and hiding the streaming shame of her face with the other.
    She tore through the outstretched hall, halfshadowed but shot dazzling with light at the far end ahead where a copper screen caught the sun in a spangle. The corridor opened onto a blazing patio and a maze of breezeways, all leading to other departments of the Clinic in the opposite wing, and holding, each at its end with the same screened door to the sun, a plaque of high burnished light.
    Miss Mintner crossed unerringly, rushing sightless through the right turns, only slowing herself when she was at last past the far screen and inside the other building. Here, she dropped her hands to her side and walked rapidly, eyes high and straight ahead, till she reached the ladies’ room where she turned in quickly, crossed the tile floor past the lavatories, entered a booth and locked the door behind her. There she sat, crying audibly for five minutes before she heard someone else come into the lavatories; and then she began to pull herself together. Eleanor Thorne? Barbara sat very still. She could just make out the hands of her tiny watch. 12:10. Nurse Thorne would be back in ten minutes. Outside the booth a lavatory tap sounded in a rush of water. Under the covering noise Miss Mintner leaned forward, her eye near the crack of the door. But too late! Whoever it was had stepped away, drying hands, and was now actually leaving. She heard the outer door open and close . . . or had someone else come in? She listened intently, staring at the black gloss of the door in front of her. Gradually she had the sensation that she could wee-wee. She leaned back quietly, listening. No one. They were gone. How quickly too! It must have been a patient, she thought, the nurses dallied so.
    It was 12:15 when Miss Mintner came out of the lavatory, and she looked as fresh and sweet as ever, except that her eyes were pinched and red. But she had retouched her whole appearance, had even, within the