Free Nurse in Waiting by Jane Arbor Page A

fission,” pursued Roger, unabashed.
    Joanna laughed. “You’re impossible!” she declared.
    “Sure, an’ it’s my Irish blood! Wouldn’t we have to be weavin’ tales for ourselves, the way we’d be dyin’ of boredom from the dullness of our lives without?” demanded Roger in an exaggerated brogue.
    Joanna looked at him thankfully. His eyes were brighter and she believed that the ‘black mood’ of the past few days was passing. If only she could keep him like that! But she would, she would!
    When she left him she wondered at the ease with which she had been so frank with him about Dale. With the beginnings of a new letter to Dale before she sat staring at the paper for a long time. From anyone else she would have resented the question as to what her relation to him was. Yet to Roger Carnehill she had expressed quite easily the doubt that was half a conviction—the belief, shared, she thought, by Dale, that one day before long they would marry.
    It was a warm, comfortable idea, she had always thought—the knowledge that there was someone with whom you could get on as placidly and agreeably as she and Dale did. It was a better basis for marriage than many people had. And yet—the flash of doubt utterly startled her—hadn’t they, so far, missed the love that wrung the heart-strings, stirred the blood? Did she or Dale know anything of the pain and mystery of ecstasy—the flinging of the spirit to the mountain-tops, the plunging to the depths?
    Foolish! she chided herself. As if ecstasy lasted, or love became anything but the easy acceptance of each other which she and Dale had already achieved! They had left r omance by the way because their relationship had no need of it. They were adults, weren’t they? Not children crying for the stars!
    Joanna picked up her pen and turned her mind resolutely to the matter in hand. Her mind — but not her heart, which cried, childishly and inconsequentially, for the unknown star which had not yet dawned for her ...
    Along with the other casual arrangements of Carrieghmere she found that no provision was made for her to have the regular daily hours ‘off-duty’ on which Matron insisted for her nurses when they were out on private cases. However, though she was busy she was not overworked and she accepted philosophically the knowledge that Mrs. Carnehill or Shuan or anyone else who was handy might—or might not—offer to take over her duties while she managed to achieve some brief private life of her own.
    However, in the midst of wintry storms came a ‘gift’ of a day of sun and warm wind, and Colonel Kimstone with his wife drove over to see Roger.
    “There, Nurse Merivale, we heard you were here!” said the Colonel, greeting her warmly. He turned to Mrs. Kimstone with an air of Joanna’s being his own invention. “Didn’t I say now,” he demanded, “that this was the very thing for Roger?”
    Mrs. Kimstone, a short, buttoned-eye woman whom Joanna had not met while she had been nursing the Colonel in London, pursed her lips and nodded twice, though Joanna thought her appraising glance was a little doubtful.
    “I think I’d been expecting someone older ,” she said.
    “Nonsense! There are no old nurses—they all get married before that, eh, Roger?” exclaimed the Colonel, roaring with laughter at his own quip. Then he said briskly: “Now we’ll take care of the patient. Nurse. Off you go and get some rare sunshine into you.”
    Joanna, who had been longing wistfully for some air, accepted her freedom gratefully. She hurried to her room, changed into tweeds and low-heeled shoes and set off for a tramp round the park.
    The gardens behind the house were not extensive; they had an air of having been sacrificed to the outbuildings, stables and kennels ranged alongside. But beyond stretched the wide vista of the park, full of magnificent timber; the spreading branches of many of the old trees were so low that Joanna had frequently to dodge beneath them as she