Free Hospital Corridors by Mary Burchell Page A

Sanders declared, with a sweet, brave smile.
    Madeline prepared to slip away, but Miss Ardingley fixed her with a cold glance.
    “Oh, Miss Gill, I want to see you before you go off duty.” “Yes, Miss Ardingley,” Madeline said, and her heart dropped into her neat white ward shoes.
    “It’s very nice to see Miss Gill again,” Mrs. Sanders put in graciously. “We’re almost old friends, you know.”
    The unfortunate repetition of the phrase made Madeline bite her lip. Miss Ardingley evidently recalled it too, for she replied more drily than she usually spoke to a special patient, “So Mr. Sanders said, and so I gathered from the way he greeted Miss Gill.”
    “From my son’s greeting?” Mrs. Sanders’ faintly complacent air of happy invalidism deserted her and her languid voice sharpened slightly.
    “All right, Miss Gill, you can go.” Miss Ardingley dismissed Madeline firmly—at the very point when she would have wished to linger and prevent misunderstandings. “Wait for me in my room when you’re finished.”
    Madeline went. There was nothing else she could do. But when she got outside she actually leant against the wall for a moment and shut her eyes. It was too much—it was too much!—that Mrs. Sanders and Frightful Flossie should actually get together to discuss her misdemeanours.
    She had forgotten that the rubber flooring deadened all sound of footsteps, so that she jumped violently when Dr. Lanyon, his professional visit presumably completed, said almost beside her,
    “What’s the matter? Are you feeling faint?”
    “Oh, no!” She opened her eyes quickly and straightened up. And so terrified was she lest Miss Ardingley should come out of Mrs. Sanders’ room and find her apparently chatting once more with Dr. Lanyon, that she actually added—to her own immediate horror and confusion, “And please do go away quickly.”
    “But why?” He looked both amused and astonished, as well he might.
    “Oh, I’m sorry!” She had refocused him now, as the distinguished surgeon of the Dominion and not just the man who had been nice to her on board. “That must sound frightfully rude. But every time someone has spoken to me today Miss Ardingley has come along, and I’m sure she thinks I do nothing but hang about talking to attrac—talking to people. I’m in for a ghastly row, as it is.”
    “I’m so sorry,” he said, and passed on immediately. But whether this was because he thought her an impossible young woman or because he understood the position completely, Madeline could not have said.
    She was shaken by the scene and by what she now felt was her own ridiculous mishandling of it, but it really seemed hardly more than the final phase in a truly disastrous day. Indeed, Madeline felt she would not be specially surprised if, after all this, she were firmly and regretfully asked to leave the Dominion.
    She completed her few last duties and tried to find Ruth, who might, she felt, be able to give her a few crumbs of comfort and advice for the coming interview. But Ruth was busy elsewhere, and so, with outward calm and inward trepidation, Madeline took her reluctant way to Miss Ardingley’s office.
    Here she had to wait at least ten minutes, feeling faintly sick. And then Miss Ardingley came in, shut the door behind her and sat down at her desk. Madeline had risen, of course, when her superior came into the room, but Miss Ardingley coldly waved her to a seat again, though somewhat as though it were a stool of penitence.
    “Please sit down, Miss Gill. I want to speak to you at some length—and very seriously.”
    Madeline sat down again and tried to look as though she did not know what it was all about Miss Ardingley moved one or two articles unnecessarily on her desk, and Madeline could not altogether escape the impression that the older woman was really rather enjoying this scene.
    “Miss Gill,” she said at last, “I want to say at once that I have no fault to find with your actual work. In