Free Promise the Doctor by Marjorie Norrell

at you,’ Pete growled. ‘I suppose they’re all alike, so used to all you nurses and Sisters and what-have-you looking up to them as though they’re little tin gods or something...’
    He broke off as Joy’s merry laughter rang out, startling him. She had been thinking of the two house surgeons with whom she had dealt for the greater part of her time at Wilborough General, the one married and with a wife so fond of a gay time that he was always worried about how to keep up with her, the other disappointed in love and vowing for the future that the only women who would interest him would be exceptional surgical cases.
    ‘You’ve got entirely the wrong idea, Pete,’ she told him. ‘I suppose Doctor Quentin—he did tell us to call him that so’s we didn’t get mixed up between him and his father, didn’t he?—was only looking at me, if indeed he looked at all, because I’d acted with what he would consider “due promptitude” when the accident happened to that unfortunate boy on the bicycle.’
    ‘That wasn’t how it seemed to me.’
    Pete was by no means mollified, and for a time they continued to drive along in silence once more. There was very little traffic. Occasionally the odd heavy long-distance lorry passed them, and when Joy made the comment that ‘knights of the road or not, they certainly know how to make those, monsters move ‘Pete’s only answer was another non-committal grunt.
    Joy did not mind. She was content to sit quietly beside him, watching the road ahead in the beam of Pete’s headlights, flunking of her unexpected meeting with Quentin Moyser and not allowing herself to dream too much about what she thought—and secretly hoped—she had read in his intent gaze.
    ‘Don’t be an idiot, Joy Benyon,’ she told herself severely. ‘For all you know he might well have a girlfriend or a fiancée —or maybe even a wife—tucked away somewhere, an attractive man like that!’
    A girl friend or even a fiancée might well be a surmountable obstacle, but if he were married...
    ‘It doesn’t seem likely,’ she thought, but she shivered slightly as the idea sped through her mind, ‘not when he’s obviously living at home with his parents.’
    ‘Cold, Joy?’ Pete had noted the shiver as, she thought in some compunction, he appeared to notice any and everything which might be adversely affecting any one of the family.
    ‘Not really, thanks.’ She took the rug he dragged from the back of the car and tucked it about herself to satisfy his instinct for caring for someone in his care. ‘Just ... how do they say it? Someone walked over my grave.’
    Pete gave her a curious glance but made no comment, and the remainder of their journey passed in almost companionable silence, except that Joy, for the first time in all the years Pete had been with them during which time she had driven thousands of miles by his side, felt a sense of strain and tension which had never before been present.
    ‘Pure emotional imagination,’ she told herself firmly as the lights of the outskirts of Wilborough came into view. ‘I’m overtired after such a full day. That must be it.’
    Just the same, when the suburb of Wilborough in which the General Infirmary was placed behind them and they were heading quickly for their own part of the town, she felt a sudden urge to be safely in her own small room, tucked up in bed, and free to think about Quentin Moyser, the house at Vanmouth and all the things which had happened to her since Mr. Belding had appeared at the hospital.
    ‘Come with me to take the car away, Joy,’ Pete invited as he turned into Cranberry Terrace. ‘It’s always a help, negotiating that corner in the dark.’
    In common with most of the houses in similar roads in Wilborough the garages at the back of the houses had been added as an afterthought when motoring became a popular mode of transport. Consequently there was not always much room, to drive into the garages erected opening out on to the