Nurse Kelsey Abroad Read Free

suddenly strung to top pitch by the unexpectedness of the opportunity offered and the strangeness of her possible destination. “When does she want your decision?”
    “She’s telephoned Mum to say I’m coming home on a granted forty-eight-hour pass,” Jane told him a little unhappily as she anticipated his next words. “I was just going to pack my weekend case and go for the four - fifteen bus.”
    “Ga and pack,” Dudley said in a quite unexpected authoritative manner. “I’ll run you home. I’ll just pop these accounts on Angie’s desk. Don’t worry,” he grinned in a suddenly boyish manner—for normally there wasn’t much boyishness where Dudley was concerned—“I shall only pop in and out. She won’t even know we met, not until we’ve had more opportunity to talk things over.”
    Jane knew it would be useless to argue. When he chose Dudley could be as stubborn as the proverbial mule, and she had grown to recognise the signs! She merely nodded and smiled her thanks and hurried off to pack her small case and to arrange with the junior staff nurse about the unexpected change in rota. She would have to convince Dudley later that she really wanted to accept this chance, even though she was by no means convinced herself that she did ... at least it would solve the Dudley problem, and by the time she returned he would, in all probability, have teamed up with someone else.
    Jane was too kind-hearted a person to do more than show Dudley she was not over-enthusiastic for his attentions. It was quite beyond her to turn round and tell him with any degree of definiteness that his presence was not welcome, nor did she want to be thought of as “Dudley Power’s girl-friend”, yet the way in which he hung about her ever since she had arrived at the nursing home was sufficient to make anyone believe they were next-door to being engaged!
    “It’s got to stop,” Jane vowed to herself as she snapped the lock on her small case. “I know Angela’s against it. She doesn’t seem to realise I’ m not keen, and Dudley’s the last person i n the world to take a hint if h e doesn’t want to! Altogether this may well be the simple way out, and even though I can’t say it’s exactly the kind of avenue I’d have chosen, given the choice, I won’t quarrel with it, if Mum doesn’t appear to mind too much.”
    There lay her biggest problem. Jane adored her parents, both of them—her quiet, thoughtful father, who worked as accountant in one of the largest firms in Rawbridge, and her merry-eyed, laughing mother who did not look by any means old enough to have a grown-up, almost independent family.
    “She’ll say ‘go’, of course,” Jane reasoned. “She wouldn’t put out a finger to prevent any of us doing anything we think we want to do, let alone something she knows one of us has always been keen about. I must say, though,” she reflected as she hurried to say good-bye to Matron and then back to where Dudley waited just round the corner from the nursing home’s portals, “I’d rather be going anywhere under W.H.O. than to some place I’ve never even heard of, whether it’s an important or attractive place or not !”
    Dudley wasted no time in getting the car away from the vicinity of the nursing home, and Jane suppressed a desire to giggle as it struck her that he was extremely anxious to avoid being noticed by his sister.
    She made no comment, however, and he turned the nose of the little saloon towards Wetherlay Crescent where Jane’s people lived, changing direction abruptly at the top of the hill. She still made no comment when he halted the car, as she had expected he would do, just round the first bend in Honkers Lane, a small, leafy lane along whose paths so many of the local young people walked when discussing their problems. Jane had never walked there since she had used the lane as a short cut home from school, years before. Now she sat quietly, her hands resting in her lap, and waited for him