Nurse Kelsey Abroad Read Free Page A

to begin.
    “Cigarette?” Dudley proffered his case, knowing she seldom smoked, but just now she felt the feel of a little white tube of tobacco in her fingers might ease something of the nervous tension which seemed to have been mounting within her ever since Angela Power’s news, and, judging by Dudley’s face, was about to reach its peak any minute now.
    “Thank you,” she said quietly, surprising him.
    She bent her head and inhaled as he lit it for her, and then she relapsed again into her old position, hands clasped, waiting.
    “Jane,” Dudley’s voice, she felt abstractedly, was so different from her father’s. Her father’s was at once businesslike and in some strange fashion reassuring. Dudley’s tone always sounded as though he were on the edge of something momentous, yet never quite reaching whatever it was. “What do you really feel about this ... this talk of Angela’s? You say you’ve always wanted to travel, there’s the rest of your life to do that in, and not working your way, either. I shall be junior partner before much longer, and while that isn’t the world, I know, it’s a good step towards achieving what we want.”
    “What you want, Dudley,” Jane surprised herself by saying, but having got so much said she was in no hurry to withdraw from the slight advantage she thought was hers, to judge by his look of utter astonishment. “I still want to travel, I still want to use all I’ve been taught as a nurse, for those who need it, wherever they are and whoever they may be. Maybe that’s not the end of the line either, but I feel it’s a worth-while job, and your sister’s friend seems to have come through all right,” she smiled.
    “But what about ... us?” Dudley said abruptly. “You’ll be changed when you come back, and I don’t know whether the change will be a good one or not, do I ? I’ll be changed too. We shall not be the same people any more, and all we’ve gained in knowledge of one another will be forgotten, gone as though it had never been.”
    “In that case I don’t think it’s been very important, then, do you?” she questioned gently. “We’ve had a good friendship. My Aunt Ruth always said a real friendship was one where people could part, not see one another or even correspond for years and then meet and carry on as though they had only just parted. That, she used to say, was real friendship ... and I think I know what she means. If a few thousand miles, a few years of parting are going to mean death to the friendship, then it couldn’t have been so very much alive in the first place, do you think?”
    “I don’t know, Jane, I really don’t.” He looked suddenly so abjectly miserable that she was suddenly afraid he was about to immerse himself in one of the sulky moods he affected when he badly wanted to gain his own way about something.
    “Let’s talk about it after I’ve told Mum and Dad,” she suggested brightly, drawing deeply on her cigarette. “I shouldn’t go if they felt I ought not to, you know. I’d rather not discuss it any more until we’ve chatted with them about it. All right?”
    She smiled and, after a moment’s hesitation, he nodded.
    “All right,” he agreed, and switched on the engine, but although for the moment a crisis had been averted Jane wasn’t comfortable about him. She knew without his saying one word that he was definitely against her leaving the nursing home at all, let alone going to the other side of the world where he could not simply pick up a telephone and speak to her whenever he so desired for the mere expenditure of a few pence.
    Mrs. Kelsey, forewarned by Angela’s telephone call, had prepared a sumptuous high tea, always insistent that, no matter how good and nutritious the food at any hospital might be, it always lacked what she thought of as “the individual touch.”
    It was useless for Jane to explain that in a small nursing home such as the Mowberry, so many people had their own individual