Nurse in Love Read Free Page B

Children’s Ward Sister.”
    Afterwards she wondered what she had expected of this surprise meeting. Embarrassment? Apology?
    But Dr . Brand merely nodded and turned back to the bed, replacing the covers. To Mrs . Horrick he said drily: “Roger is fortunate, you know. Not much wrong with him that won’t heal quickly. But you realise, don’t you, that you’re not going to be able to let him run such risks again? A child of five—and out on the streets at that hour of night! What are you thinking of to allow it?”
    The woman opened her mouth once or twice before she burst out: “I can’t help it, Doctor. At night I clean offices in the West End, and I have to leave home at five o’clock. Can’t put him to bed that early, can I? There’s nobody to look after him. I’m a widow.”
    “Have you no neighbours you could leave him with?”
    “It’s the neighbours’ lads who come round and take him on the streets,” she retorted.
    “Well, can’t you get daytime work near home, so that you would be out when he is at school and at home with him when he should be in bed? ”
    To that she made no reply, but an incoherent mutter to the effect that “getting work on your own doorstep wasn’t that easy—let the Doctor try, some time”, and Kathryn, pitying her said quickly: “Perhaps you’d like Mrs . Horrick to see the Social Worker, Doctor Brand? I could speak to her about the case.”
    “Yes, do. No—I’ll see the Social Worker myself.” He turned back to Mrs . Horrick. “Sister will let you come in again to-morrow, I daresay. Meanwhile the boy will be all right.”
    She read his words as dismissal and scuttled away. Kathryn ventured, “It’s very difficult for mothers who go out to work, you know.”
    His eyes met hers uncompromisingly. “But one can’t blame the children—or hope to teach them caution at that age. They’ve got to be someone’s responsibility, and whose but the parents’?”
    “I suppose Mrs . Horrick would have got daytime work if she could,” murmured Kathryn.
    He shrugged. “Yes, well—I propose to put that to the test. I’ve just moved into a house nearby, and I suppose I shall need a daily woman. That’s why I said I ’d like to see the Social Worker. T dar esay she’ll be able to get me Mrs. Horrick’s references and all that.”
    Kathryn glanced at him in grateful surprise. Nothing of his brusque manner towards the child’s mother had revealed this warmth of purpose behind his questions. She said impulsively: “That sounds like a happy ending, Doctor!”
    “Surely no more than an obvious solution, Sister?” Above his straight grey eyes his brows were raised in a way she was to come to know well. It was his dismissal of a subject of no further significance to him. And it had, she decided at her first experience of it, a damping effect.
    As they made the round of the rest of the ward she could not but admire his manner with those most difficult of patients—children. His very hands seemed to have a gentle understanding which even the tiny babies could trust; he asked the minimum of questions, and his orders were given with a precision which even the junior nurse could appreciate. And Kathryn’s mental verdict was a thankful one—“He’ll take some knowing. But working with hi m should be worthwhile!”
    They returned together to her office, and as he bent to sign some papers with a scrawled “Adam Brand” she stood by, watching him and realising with a little sense of shock that in the brief pause she was seeing him not so much as a welcome colleague as with an instant electric awareness of him as a man.
    She found herself noticing the controlled strength of the fingers spread to support him as he wrote; appraising the way the hair grew back from the broad, intelligent brow; judging him to be about twelve years her senior—and for some reason comparing him with Steven—with Steven Carter, who she had not been able to love ...
    He straightened and handed the