Nurse for the Doctor Read Online Free

prevailing color scheme.
    “Sit down, Nurse,” she said, in rather a thin, petulant voice, “and help yourself to a drink if you’d like one.” She obviously made an effort to appear pleasant and forget the annoyance she was feeling. “Is Michael comfortable?”
    “Quite comfortable, Mrs. Duveen. After a rest this afternoon he’ll probably be quite bright this evening.”
    “Then he’ll be able to come downstairs to dinner?”
    “I wouldn’t advise it.”
    The wealthy Irish widow crushed out the end of the cigarette she was smoking in an ash tray at her elbow, and then selected another from an expensive shagreen case. She didn’t offer the case to Josie.
    “How soon do you think he’ll start getting back to normal?”
    “You mean how soon will he be fit?”
    “Fit enough to travel—to get away from here.” She pretended she didn’t hear the sound of the luncheon gong that was booming through the house, and looked as if her main desire then was to settle down and extract information. But Josie’s half unconscious glance of admiration about the splendidly proportioned room had been caught and held by a photograph on the enormous roll-topped desk in the window, and for a few seconds the appreciation it aroused was plainly pictured on her face. She was certain that never in her life had she gazed at anyone as lovely as the girl in the beaten silver frame—a girl with a smile so warm and enticing that it could not have left unaffected her bitterest enemy, and eyes put in, as the Irish themselves phrase it, with a “sooty” finger.
    Mrs. Duveen followed the direction of her glance, and her lips tightened. She recognized the effect the photograph was having, and remarked dryly: “That is a studio portrait of the young woman my son hoped he was going to marry.”
    “Oh!” Josie exclaimed, and recalled that only that morning she had been wondering whether there was any truth in Rachel Richardson’s story of an unhappy love affair that had been the cause of Dr. Duveen’s accident.
    “ Hoped he was going to marry, I said,” Mrs. Duveen repeated, “because it’s all over now. It ended in a blaze of sunshine, somewhere down on the edge of the Mediterranean, while I was staying with friends in Ireland and wondering how soon we would be starting wedding preparations.”
    “Oh!” Josie articulated again, and this time the word sounded as if it was wrung out of her, and was simply weighted down with sympathy—the first real sympathy she had felt for Mrs. Duveen. “What—what a disappointment that must have been for you,” she heard herself saying inadequately.
    “It was,” the older woman admitted, “but it was something worse than a disappointment for Michael. As a result of it he ended up in a nursing home—and I thought I was going to lose him,” she finished, with a sudden look of anguish on her face.
    Josie sat with her hands clasped in her lap, bereft of words before that naked display of feeling, behind which, she was convinced, there lay an almost unnatural bitterness and resentment. Mrs. Duveen’s mascara threatened to run as the tears coursed their way down her cheeks, and her bright blue eye-shadow looked absurd, as her age, and the strain of the past few weeks showed up with sudden vicious clarity. But she made a tremendous effort and conquered her passing weakness.
    “However—all that is over now. All those dreadful days and nights when his life hung in the balance. And now that they are over I want to get him away—away before he has a chance to start serious brooding! It is always the readjustment period that follows on a broken engagement that is the most difficult to survive, especially when there is physical weakness as well, and Michael must be helped to get over it as quickly as possible. A friend of mine—the son of a very close girlhood friend—has invited us to stay with him in Spain, and not only would we escape the winter—or, at any rate, a part of it—but the