Nurse in Waiting Read Free Page A

expected to find at Carrieghmere? Those broken down walls, a household which apparently commanded the use of only one car, a hostess who was a journalist and whose ward gave riding lessons in order to make money—nothing of all this seemed to tie up with the valuable and antique appointments of the luncheon table, nor with those pearls about her employer’s throat, nor indeed with the fact of an agent who could afford to possess and use an expensive American car.
    Joanna knew that none of this was any business of he r s, but though she tried to dismiss it from her mind and to accept what came, as an employee should, it made her all the more curious to meet the member of the household who was to be her special care—Roger Carnehill. She was glad, therefore, when at the end of the meal his mother said:
    “Now you would like to see Roger, I dare say?”
    “Yes, I should.” Joanna hesitated. “Would you like me to get into uniform first?”
    Mrs. Carnehill looked vague. “I don’t know. Do you have to?”
    “Well, there’s no rule about it,” smiled Joanna. “It is for you to say.”
    “Then I think not—for now. You look charming as you are. And I want Roger to like you—not to feel that he is being regimented. I think maybe that you’ll see why, when you’ve known him for a little while.”
    She led the way to another room on the ground floor, of which, Joanna’s swift professional glance told her, the furnishings were far too heavy for a sick room and that it was woefully overcrowded.
    The overcrowding was due partly to the presence of three large dogs, one of which, an Irish setter, lumbered off the foot of the bed as they entered.
    “Dogs Dogs!” protested Mrs. Carnehill half-heartedly as they surrounded Joanna and flung their forepaws almost to her shoulder. “Roger, call them off. Miss Merivale may n ot like dogs.”
    The young man in the bed lowered the book he had been reading.
    “Then maybe they won’t like her,” he said in a deep, attractive voice. “What then?”
    “But I do,” said Joanna with a smile. The expulsion of the creatures from her patient’s room would probably take time and a fair amount of tact, and today— w hen she hadn’t even the status which uniform would give her—was not a suitable occasion, she felt.
    She looked at her new patient with interest. And he looked at her.
    For some reason she had misread her instructions about him. She had expected him to be a mere boy— n ot much over twenty, if that. But he looked nearer thirty—a man with a thin face, a stubbornly formed jawline and a petulant mouth. His eyes were as blue as his mother’s, but his hair was red—a mass of flaming “carrots.” He ran his hand rather wearily through it as he looked at Joanna.
    He saw a girl, tall, slim, with a clear, delicate skin which flushed in her cheeks to only the slightest colouring. Her straight nose had fine nostrils; her eyes were grey beneath level brows; her hair—a pale spun gold—was caught into a knot at the nape of her neck.
    Pure Anglo-Saxon—as cold and stiff-necked as they come—was Roger Carnehill’s mental comment. She looked now as if she had very little humanity. Put her into stiff cuffs and a starched apron and she wouldn’t have any!
    Then she smiled again—and his judgment checked. If she could really smile like that—with a kind of lighting up from within—maybe she had some possibilities after all. But he hoped they weren’t buried too deeply—it would bore him so to dig them out.
    With her smile Joanna said: “How do you do?” He liked her for that. No doubt the time would come when she would have the right to tweak at his pillows and ask brightly: “Well, how are we feeling today?”—which would irritate him to near despair. But at least today she had the good sense to behave towards him as if he were a newly introduced man and not a useless hulk.
    He returned a “How do you do” of his own. Then he turned to his mother. “You said