Free Air Ambulance by Jean S. Macleod Page B

semi-consciousness, because, when she looked up again, Blair of Heimra was standing in the room. It was full daylight, and the lamp which had been burning on the round table beside the window had been extinguished.
    “Ronald?” she questioned rather desperately. “Have you brought him in?”
    He came across to the sofa, standing between her and the light so that she could not see his face very clearly.
    “Half an hour ago. We took him straight to Garrisdale. It was the best thing to do.” She thought that he spoke with pity, but she could not be sure. “He’s pretty badly damaged, I’m afraid.”
    “Oh...”
    All the blood had left her cheeks, and she clenched her hands by her side as she said:
    “You think there isn’t a lot of hope?”
    “Good gracious, no,” he said. “There’s always hope. What I was trying to say was that he may have to remain here for some time.”
    Out of the blue, the memory of Ronald Gowrie’s voice came to her, fierce with bitterness:
    “Seclusion is necessary to some people, and Blair of Heimra guards his assiduously!”
    “And that would annoy you?” she heard herself saying with reflected bitterness. “Your island’s privacy would be hopelessly violated if we stayed.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” he said briefly, frowning down at her. “There can be absolutely no question of personal feelings in this. I am a doctor, and my first duty is to a badly injured man. Surely you understand that? You’re a nurse.”
    “Yes, I understand,” she told him weakly. “But I’m going to be something of a burden to you, too—at least till you can send for another plane to take me back to the mainland.”
    She thought that he smiled, but could not quite be sure. She was very tired, and the pain round her ribs stabbed incessantly now.
    “We’ll see about that in a day or two,” he said. “ B.E.A. will probably send their own doctor out from Renfrew when they come to have a look at the Heron. Meantime,” he added somewhat dryly, “I can do my best to make you comfortable, even though you prefer to behave like an unwilling prisoner.”
    That wasn’t it at all, she tried to tell him, but suddenly felt too weak to argue.
    “This is going to be quite painful,” he told her almost ruthlessly as he rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll give you a shot of something when I can, but we’ll have to find out first where exactly the trouble is. There’s bound to be torn muscle, but we’ll see what we can do first to ease the pain.”
    “I can’t remember falling,” she said vaguely as he swabbed an area of skin and ran a hypodermic needle expertly beneath the surface.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    WHEN Alison wakened the following morning she found herself strapped securely from just above her ribs to the top of her thigh. There was very little pain left. In fact, most of the discomfort she felt was in her arm, which had not pained her at all the day before.
    Was it the day before? Had she slept all day and all night? She knew that it was early morning because it was cool and grey outside, and somewhere a cock had crowed.
    Cautiously she looked about her. She had been moved from the kitchen—by whom?—to a small, airy bedroom in another part of the lodge. Upstairs, she imagined, because she could just see the tops of trees through the small lattice window on the flat wall, and a patch of sky which was rapidly turning blue. There was the smell of the sea, too, coming in over a weed-strewn shore.
    The sea! She shivered as she thought of the events which had brought her here. What had happened to Ronald, and Ginger and the plane?
    For a long time she lay re-living the nerve-shattering events of those last few minutes before the Heron had crashed, hearing the steady throb of the engines and experiencing again the intensity of the silence as they had cut out.
    It was madness to keep thinking about it, she told herself, yet her mind reverted to those tensely-packed seconds of drama again and again. If it