Strange Recompense Read Online Free

health in one of the privat e rooms at the hospital.
    “Your patient is in here, Topsy,” she explained, opening the sitting-room door. “My brother doesn’t think she should be moved, so we won’t bother to undress her until she has had a long, refreshing sleep.”
    Sara had preceded her into the room and was standing looking down at the nameless girl on the settee with her most professional expression.
    “Young, indeed,” she mused, “to have come to this! Loss of memory. One invariably associates it with some sort of tragedy. Well,” she concluded briskly, “we should know part of the answer by the morning, if not all of it.”
    For the remainder of the afternoon Ruth found herself chained to the house, “hovering,” as she put it, “outside the sitting-room like a broody hen with her first patch of chicks,” waiting for any sound from within that would tell her the girl was awake.
    Once, when she opened the door noiselessly, she found Topsy dozing in the chair beside the window and marvelled once again at the capacity of nurses in general for hard work and an ever-cheerful disposition. Surely, she mused, they must be born and not made!
    Topsy’s patient had not stirred, but even Ruth could see that she was sleeping naturally now. She closed the door with a sigh of relief, thinking that it remained only to wait for Noel’s verdict when he came home some time after six o’clock.
    Wondering why this case should suddenly have come to mean so much to her, she saw her brother’s tall figure approaching from the direction of the hospital and glanced hastily at the clock; it was a full hour before his usual time for returning and she knew that anxiety about his new patient must have brought him.
    “How is she?” he asked without preliminary. “I thought I would pop over and have another look at her.”
    “She appears to have been sleeping quite naturally most of the afternoon, ” Ruth told him. “Nurse Craven has been with her, and there has been no sign of complications.”
    He nodded, pausing by the closed door of the sitting-room, his face gravely thoughtful as he turned over a possible suggestion in his mind, but he went on into the room without communicating his thoughts to his sister, and Ruth turned back to the kitchen to prepare his evening meal.
    She was peeling potatoes when Sara Enman appeared at the back door for the second time that day.
    “I’ve just come off duty,” she explained, “and I wondered if there was anything I could do for you. About the girl, I mean,” she added when Ruth looked puzzled. “Has Noel notified the police yet?”
    “I don’t know.” Ruth felt vaguely irritated by the question for some unknown reason, wishing, almost, that Sara had stayed away. “He’s with her now, as a matter of fact. I suppose he’ll want to check up on her reactions as soon as she returns to full consciousness.”
    “There’s a police surgeon to do that sort of job,” Sara returned sharply.
    “Oh! Tim won’t mind!” Ruth smiled. “Anyway, I believe he’s still away in London.”
    She thought of Tim Wedderburn, slow, stolid, not given to a quick decision, but universally liked wherever he went. They called him Doctor Watson even to his face, and he laughed quietly at their joke and went on doing his job slowly but surely.
    “That doesn’t exactly make Noel responsible for all the police cases that come in while he’s away,” Sara remarked dryly. “He’s far too busy to be bothered with routine stuff like this, and I understood he was operating this afternoon.”
    “Yes,” Ruth said, “but he must have got through early. He came in just before you did.”
    For the first time in their long acquaintance she was finding it difficult to understand Sara , thinking of her unexpected visit as bordering on interference, but that was unreasonable where an old friend was concerned. Ever since her recent illness small details had been apt to take on undue importance, and she made up