Free A Promise Is for Keeping by Felicity Hayle

been on duty over the weekend. She knew, however, that he could not fail to do a round on Monday and steeled herself to meet him with whatever degree of recognition that he afforded her.
    He came before she expected him and she was at the far end of the ward dealing with a rather difficult patient who was refusing to co-operate with the more junior nurses.
     
    Flip came down the ward with the rapid sliding gait which was just not running and said with a little gasp, "Mr. Osborne, Sister," and with a heavenward turn of her eyes expressed very dramatically her own feelings for the "dishy" Mr. Osborne.
    Fay, with a final cautionary word to the patient, walked to the other end of the ward where Mark and Shorty were standing just inside the door waiting for her. Never did the distance seem so long or the floor so slippery.
    Mark's face was impassive. "Good morning, Sister," he said pleasantly "You are taking over from Sister Rainbow, I understand?"
    "Yes—just temporarily," she told him.
    He looked at her with a long searching glance which Fay could not quite fathom and then nodded briefly and said, "Let's take a look at the patients, shall we?"
    The round proceeded on strictly professional lines—at least as far as Sister and Registrar were concerned, but Shorty nearly disgraced himself by trying repeatedly to fix a date with Fay by soundless lip-talking. Each time before he could get the message across to Fay, who only greeted it with a frown, Mark recalled him to the patient's notes or condition abruptly, although from all the signs he could not have been aware of Shorty's efforts.
    At the end of the round, just before the two doctors passed through the swing doors, he turned to Fay with a smile and said, "I must congratulate you, Sister, on the way you've done your homework. I hope you'll be very happy here—Sister Gabriel." And with that he was gone.
    After the round was over and Fay was straightening the files on her desk she suddenly threw back her head and laughed. What had she been afraid of? Just because the whole atmosphere of Beechcroft had been so utterly beyond her ken she had built up all her experiences there into gigantic, dramatic proportions. It suddenly seemed to her absurd that she should have been so troubled by a kiss under the mistletoe. Even for a married man there was no harm in that. And that was all it had been—just a kiss under the mistletoe at a Christmas party.
    But even in the clinical atmosphere of her office Fay had
     
    to admit that the experience had left a scar on her. No need for her to feel degraded, though, for Mark had obviously been quite unaware that on her side she had given her love with the kiss. She stood for a moment, remembering—and a little shiver went through her. She was remembering not Beechcroft, but the way Mark had spoken her name that morning. "Sister Gabriel" he had said, but he had spoken it as though it had been her christian name and spelt differently. Like Toni spoke it when she was confused as to whether that was her name and not Fay. It told her nothing, promised nothing, but left her with the tantalising certainty that Mark did not intend that in their new relationship the old could be entirely left out.
    Perhaps by reason of the constantly changing stream of patients who pass through a ward, some of them for quite serious operations, the life of a Ward Sister seems to pass more quickly than it actually does, and after only a week on Stanhope Ward it seemed to Fay as though she had been there all her life. And she was loving it. Men patients were of course notoriously easier to handle than women, and in Stanhope they all revelled in a pretty young Sister who was at the same time one hundred per cent efficient.
    Fay was lucky too in her nurses. They were all happy to be on a surgical ward, and a men's ward at that, and they co-operated to the full. Fay had just wondered if there would be any difficulties with Flip, for while they had both been on Anderson ward