Nurse for the Doctor Read Online Free Page B

color.
    “Don’t be in such a rush. Nurse. I want to know whether my mother has told you about this Spanish idea of hers.”
    Josie admitted that she had.
    “Have you ever been to Spain?” he asked.
    “No, never.”
    “Then you’ll enjoy the Costa Brava—and you couldn’t possibly wear a uniform on the Costa Brava!” He was fighting against waves of sleep, and his long eyelashes were drooping downwards, but he still had something to say. “I used to think you were rather a mouse-like person, Nurse Winter—although there’s nothing in the least wintry about you—but now I’m not so sure. You’ve got brown eyes and fair hair, and that’s an uncommon combination in this country. You’re a brown-eyed, fair-haired mouse.”
    And then he was asleep.

 
    CHAPTER III
    For the next two weeks Josie found it less difficult to assert her authority in the Duveen household than she would have believed possible when she left London.
    Her patient improved markedly, and was reasonably amenable to having his waking hours supervised and his hours of sleep insisted upon, even though they frequently encroached on a period of the daytime when he would prefer to be awake. As a doctor he probably recognized that it would be absurd to be unco-operative and delay his own return to health; but as a man in his early thirties, with all sorts of things that he would almost certainly have preferred to do rather than lie in a long chair with an adjustable footrest and a cushion stuffed in at the right angle behind his sleek dark head, he was, Josie considered, remarkably patient. And in spite of his mother’s fears of serious brooding, he spent many hours in the library browsing over the contents of its shelves with the lovely young woman in the beaten silver frame sitting almost at his elbow on the roll-topped desk.
    He had but to turn his head to meet those breathtaking Irish eyes and that smile that should have been the very thing to retard his convalescence, but so far Josie had never caught him doing so. She was a little surprised that the photograph remained where it was, but decided that this was too delicate a matter to be dealt with even by Mrs. Duveen, and that unless Michael himself desired the picture’s removal, it would remain where it was. And apparently he didn’t desire it.
    Daily he grew stronger, alerter, more interested in his own return to health, and above all amazingly affable to both of the women who shared so many of his waking hours with him. His mother saw to it that she passed much of her time in his company, but Josie absented herself whenever she could without feeling that she was neglecting her job. It was glorious, early autumn weather, and she prowled happily in the garden, ablaze with all the wonderful colors of autumn—the rich reds and mauves of dahlias and spiky asters, the yellow of goldenrod, the pale flame of a creeper that overhung the walls of the kitchen garden—and sat on a bench in the orchard where the russet apples glowed between the leaves. She spent a good deal of her time in the tiny sunken rose garden, where the paths were littered with petals, red, yellow and white, like crumpled butterflies’ wings, and the air was heavy with scent, and thought what a perfect house King’s Folly was when she looked back at it framed in trees. Michael had told her that it dated from the time of the second Charles, and that according to a local story the Merry Monarch had handed it over to one of his lady friends, who in turn had handed it over to one of her own particular friends—hence the name King’s Folly.
    But whatever the folly of Charles the Second, Josie knew that if she had possessed such a house herself she would have never wished to leave it. Reflecting, during her solitary walks, on the behaviour of a young woman who had not only turned down a man like Michael Duveen, but a gracious home such as King’s Folly, she found it hard to credit. The young woman must have been extremely