Strange Recompense Read Free Page B

that look because she understood Noel and all that his profession meant to him as no one else could understand. When he was engrossed in a case nothing else mattered to him, and quite often he had taken her into his confidence in that respect, a compliment which Sara appreciated to the full. As second in command of the nursing staff, she held her own small niche in the little community of which he was virtually head, and a sense of power had developed in her out of all proportion to her importance. She was beginning to make herself objectionable to those who worked under her, but she kept that side of her character for the hospital wards and those times when Noel was well out of earshot!
    There were things about Noel she might never know, tender, passionate things that went deep to the soul of the man, but she had assured herself that she could do without these things because they had so many other things in common. She was the sort of p erson Noel needed, someone who would understand his work and is ambitions and share his interests with him. That, Sara had decided, was really the most important thing in life.
    Her friendship with Ruth had been cultivated largely to the end of getting to know Noel in his off-duty hours, a thing which might not have been possible otherwise, and as she came into the kitchen she smiled at Ruth.
    “Why the kitchen?” she asked “And where’s the patient?”
    “Noel wants her to sleep all she can,” Ruth explained. “We’ve left her on the settee in the sitting-room. It’s comfortable enough there and there’s no point in moving her upstairs at present.”
    “Not when we’ll be moving her across to the wards in the morning,” Sara agreed briskly taking charge automatically. “I’ll make all the arrangements and then you won’t have any more trouble. What’s the matter?” she asked, turning to Noel for the first time.
    “Amnesia,” he said briefly. “She’s young. It may only be a temporary lapse.”
    “I see.” Ruth watched Sara’s face take on its most professional expression, her grey eyes rather hard, her fine lips firmly compressed as she accepted the cigarette Noel proffered. “Another case for Inspector Evans, I suppose. We’ve had ‘em before!”
    “ Not like this,” Ruth heard herself saying sharply, contradicting the suggestion in the younger girl’s voice. “This girl ’ s different.”
    Sara’s carefully shaped eyebrows went up.
    “In what way?” she asked mildly. “They mostly turn out to have a fairly seedy history, picked up off the street like that.”
    “This girl wasn ’ t exactly picked up off the streets,” Noel informed her quietly. “Ruth came across her out on the moors after she had walked some considerable distance, it seems. She doesn’t look—the other type.”
    Sara glanced at him sharply, then at Ruth.
    “This certainly makes a difference,” she said in a completely changed voice. “Could there have been an accident, do you suppose? Perhaps she walked away from the scene of it in a dazed condition and can’t quite recall what happened. She may have had a blow of some kind, on the head, for instance, which would account for the amnesia,” she added professionally.
    “We shall take all that into account,” Noel said. “We’ll know by the time we report the case,” he added. “And the police will check up on possible accidents in the district.”
    “It almost seems as if Noel is reluctant to call in the police,” Sara observed as Ruth filled a hot-water bottle at the sink. “I wonder why?”
    Ruth handed her the bottle.
    “You’ll see for yourself in a minute,” she said. “Will you carry that in for me?”
    The nurse who had come across from the hospital was still waiting in the hall and Ruth smiled as she recognized the girl, glad that “Topsy” Craven was on duty because of a rich quality of understanding in her make-up which she had discovered d uring her own recent illness, when she had been nursed back to