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“Can’t I take over half way through the night?” Charlotte suggested.

“No.” Hannah shook her head. “I promised the doctor I’d be on hand just in case — well, just in case, you know! ”

“But he’s not badly injured, is he?” Charlotte whispered, with a sudden extraordinary amount of fear in her voice as she moved nearer to the couch.

Hannah’s reply was almost as non-committal as the doctor’s would have been.

“We don’t think so, but that was a ghastly crash he was involved in. I’ll never forget the startling explosion when that petrol tank blew up!”

Charlotte stood looking down at the finely-drawn face on her immaculate pillows.

“I do hope you and Dr. Mackay are right,” she barely breathed. “I hope he’s not badly hurt! ”

Hannah flickered a somewhat surprised glance at her.

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” she mused, “that only an hour or so ago we were talking about him? At that stage I don’t think it would have hurt you very much if you’d heard that he’d jumped into the sea! ”

Then she smiled unexpectedly.

“Do you remember what we were talking about only yesterday ? About the nursing-home,

I mean. Well, we’ve got our first patient! ”

CHAPTER IV

CHARLOTTE found it impossible to sleep once she retired to bed. For one thing, she had neglected to provide herself with a hot-water bottle, and almost certainly her experiences of the evening had been a shock to her, and in a sense she was suffering from shock.

She felt chilled, and unable to get warm, and her brain was so alert that sleep, she was sure, would evade her altogether until dawn broke. And as soon as it was dawn she must make absolutely certain that Hannah was relieved.

But long before dawn cast a pearly light across the sea she had left her bed and paid two stealthy trips downstairs to ascertain whether everything was all right in the drawing room. Opening the door without disturbing Hannah, she saw that the patient was undisturbed on the couch, and Hannah was sitting under the standard lamp with a neglected book open on her lap.

Charlotte stole back to bed, and ten minutes later decided to get up and dress and go down to the kitchen and make some tea. She had pulled a warm sweater over her head as an accompaniment to a pair of slacks, sponged her face and hurriedly combed her hair, and was creeping along the corridor towards the head of the stairs when a moving shadow in a doorway attracted her attention, and to her horror she saw in the dim light a tall figure swaying precariously and holding on to the jamb of the door at the same time.

Charlotte fairly raced to his side, and managed to prevent him slipping in a crumpled heap to the floor.

“What on earth are you doing?” she demanded in tones of the utmost horror. “How on earth did you get up the stairs?”

Richard answered her in a perfectly lucid but rather faint voice. “Walked up, of course.” He was trying not to lean too heavily on her, because for one thing they were very close to the head of the stairs, and for another she seemed very small in comparison with his height, and close up against him the disparity became very obvious. But in the dim light of the corridor his pallor was alarming, and although his voice was clear his movements were vague. “That couch was so damned cramped. I thought if I could find a bedroom....”

“But of course,” Charlotte answered soothingly, thanking her stars

— and his — that she had had a disturbed night, and that even although

Hannah had obviously succumbed to drowsiness she had not. And she was not even a partially trained nurse! “My room is very close, and if you lean on me you’ll be able to make it. But you must lean on me!” she implored, as he seemed determined to avoid doing so. “I’m not so fragile that I can’t stand a little strain! ”

A wan smile touched his lips as he glanced down at her in the poor light... and the corridor was very badly lighted indeed. Charlotte made a mental resolve to alter all the bulbs the following day.

“You don’t seem to me to be a very stout sort of a person. But then you never were, were you? Just a kind of sprite when you were five years old! ”

“In here,” Charlotte gasped, and urged him with every ounce of her strength to incline towards the open door of her room. Once inside it he seemed to be struck by the very feminine atmosphere, for in the short time at her disposal she had actually transformed it considerably, and in addition to the handsome period furniture and the thick carpet a lot of her things were scattered about, including photographs of her parents, perfume bottles on the dressing-table and some wispy items of underwear lying over the back of a chair.

“But this is your room! ” he protested.

“It doesn’t matter. And fortunately the bed is fairly warm. But I’ll get you some hot-water bottles, and wake up Hannah. She must have fallen asleep! ”

“Let her sleep,” he urged, as he settled down thankfully against her tumbled pillows.

But Charlotte tore downstairs and startled Hannah very nearly out of her wits as she shook her awake. Hannah blinked up at her bewilderedly for a moment, and then leapt up out of her chair as the shock of realisation was borne in on her.

“Oh, don’t tell me I fell asleep! ” she wailed. “You did.” Charlotte sounded terse, but she was consumed with anxiety for the patient upstairs, and the disastrous effect the walk up the wide staircase might have had on him. She would never have believed, a few days ago, that she could feel such concern for someone who was not closely related to her — and as she had no close relations that made it all the stranger, for she had no yardstick with which to measure the quality of her concern. “But fortunately for you and Mr. Tremarth I’ve hardly closed my eyes, and instead of rolling downstairs he’s upstairs in my bed. You’d better come at once and make certain he’s all right.”

Hannah needed no second bidding, but flew ahead of Charlotte up the stairs, and into the room her friend and hostess had selected for her own.

Richard Tremarth must have been very uncomfortable on the drawing-room couch, for the old-fashioned feather bed on the huge half tester that stood in the middle of the pale fawn carpet with big pink roses sprawling all over it had struck him as the next best thing to floating on a cloud when his stiffened limbs had relaxed themselves upon it, and he was already sunk in deep and apparently peaceful slumber. Hannah felt his pulse without disturbing him, satisfied herself that, although quick, it was not actually racing, and sank down on Charlotte’s dressing-table chair with a moan of dismay.

“What will Dr. Mackay think of me?” she wailed.

Charlotte, conscious of immense relief, regarded her kindly.

“There’s no reason why he should ever hear that you didn’t keep awake. After all, it’s some time since you were actively engaged in nursing, and I don’t want to sound as if I begrudged it you, but you did drink most of the wine at dinner, and you’re probably not used yet to the strong sea air. If anything had happened to the patient on the way up the stairs it would have been different. But you say he’s all right! ” “He seems to be reasonably all right.”

But Hannah was inclined to rock backwards and forwards with distress.

“It’s an unpardonable thing for a nurse to fall asleep on duty! And I never did it before ... no, not even in my very earliest days as a probationer! I was too afraid of the ward sister, for one thing.”

“Well, there’s no ward sister here, and we can tell Dr. Mackay that you’d left the room for a moment and Richard — Mr. Tremarth

— seized the opportunity to vanish up the stairs.”

Hannah regarded her with hollow eyes.

“The patient knows I was asleep. And what would have happened if you hadn’t been awake?”

“I was awake because I was cold and couldn’t get to sleep.” And that reminded Charlotte that Richard was still without hot-water bottles. “There was no particular virtue attaching to the fact that I was awake while you snatched a nap, but now that we’re both up I think we’d better give the maximum amount of attention to our first patient —” and she smiled encouragingly at Hannah. “You go and take a bath and I’ll fill the hot-water bottles and make us some tea. As a matter of fact, I was on my way down to the kitchen to make tea when I ran into

Richard____ Somehow I can’t get used to calling him Mr. Tremarth!”

It was an admission she made to herself rather than Hannah.

It was a wonderful early dawn, and the sea was flushed with rose as she made the tea. She stood beside the kitchen window and looked out at the delightfully fresh world of dew-drenched roses and white-capped lazy wavelets, and thought of the green cliff-top where Richard’s car had come to grief absorbing the warmth from the first rays of sun, and wondered what the real explanation was of that mad burst of speed of his the night before. He had been driving quite recklessly, and he must have been aware of it himself. He was not the sort of man to bother about his dinner... or that was the impression she had received of him. He might have been healthily hungry, but he wouldn’t have risked

his car and his life simply and solely because the landlord at the Three Sailors might have assumed that he was not returning for dinner that night, and locked up the kitchen.

In any case, the landlord at the inn was much too obliging not to provide something for a guest.

Charlotte felt inclined to shake her head over that ridiculous explanation, and at the same time her curiosity was aroused, and she wished she knew the answer. But one man’s poison was another man’s meat. Only a few days ago she and Hannah had been discussing the starting of a nursing-home, and now here they were with their first patient! He was a patient they were hardly likely to have for long, for the doctor was almost certain to whisk him off to the local hospital after he had seen him that morning, and that would be the end of an unusual episode.

Goodbye to Richard Tremarth.... Possibly an agreement with his agents to sell to him, and then back to normal again. Very likely back to London and the old routine.

But when the doctor called he was not so optimistic about the idea of removing his patient. The hospital was fairly full, and their beds were precious. Richard Tremarth seemed to be doing reasonably well where he was, although he was undoubtedly slightly concussed and in addition to a strapped-up arm an ankle was injured and had to be dealt with. The doctor was satisfied as a result of his examination that no other serious damage had resulted from the accident — which was a miracle — and all the patient really needed was rest and attention. He was certainly somewhat astonished when he heard that his patient had selected a moment when his nurse was temporarily absent to walk upstairs and install himself in Charlotte’s room, but apart from raised eyebrows he said nothing.

It was Charlotte who offered the explanation about Hannah being temporarily absent, and she could tell by the faintest flicker of amusement in Richard’s eyes that he understood she was defending her friend. He said nothing, however — perhaps because her own eyes were quite definitely appealing to him — and afterwards Hannah thanked her in gruff tones.

“You shouldn’t have done it, you know,” she said. “Your precious Richard is perfectly well aware that I fell asleep on duty, and one day when he feels like it he may tell Dr. Mackay. Not that I care,” she added, with an air of bravado. “I’ve no intention of returning to nursing, so it doesn’t worry me.”

But Charlotte had already observed how eager she was to please Dr. Mackay, whose red hair positively quivered like a flaming torch in the morning sunlight that filled the sick-room, and she was quite sure she would blench most unhappily if he rebuked her. She smiled a little to herself, wondering why human beings went out of their way to deceive themselves.

But they had a problem on their hands which prevented her thinking about very much else just then, and that was to ensure that the patient didn’t have a serious relapse as a result of being cared for by them. It was obvious Dr. Mackay thought Hannah was quite capable of taking charge of the nursing, but he did offer to send a night nurse along as soon as he could find one who was free.

“It isn’t easy nowadays, however,” he explained, “and this is an out-of-the way place. In London it would be different, of course...

He turned to the patient.

“You’ve no objection to being looked after here by Miss Woodford and Miss Cootes?” he asked.

Richard, who was still extremely drowsy and difficult to rouse, smiled faintly.

“You’d better put the question to Miss Woodford and Miss Cootes,” he suggested. “They are the ones who are going to be bur-

dened with me, and I should hardly think they want me here.”

But Charlotte assured him earnestly that, since the doctor didn’t seem to think it would be a good thing to move him, they were quite in agreement that he should remain where he was.

“In your bed?” he asked, looking straight up at her and proving, by the slight quirk at one comer of his mouth, that he was not actually suffering from amnesia, and he knew perfectly well what was going on around him.

“There are lots of rooms in the house,” she replied, automatically smoothing the top of his sheet, “and I can choose another for myself.” “How long can I stay here?”

“As long as it’s necessary.”

He smiled in a curiously contented manner, and turned his face to the wall.

“In that case I shall probably become a permanent invalid,” he murmured drowsily.

For the remainder of that day he slept under the influence of the drugs that had been administered to him, and required little or no attention from his nurses. Hannah took up her station beside his bed, and arranged with Charlotte to have a sleep during the evening so that she could take over during the night, and she made it perfectly clear that Charlotte was to have little to do with the actual nursing of the patient, not so much because she was untrained but because the circumstances were slightly peculiar. After all, as she pointed out to her friend, Richard Tremarth was virtually a stranger to her... and the fact that she had known him when she was five years old didn’t add a touch of conventionality to her performing services for him that an unmarried girl wouldn’t normally perform for a little-known man of Tremarth’s years.