Strange Recompense Read Online Free Page A

her mind to speak to Noel about it whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. A tonic or something was probably all she needed.
    “Has she been sleeping all this time?” Sara asked, still determined to pursue the one subject which interested her. “I wonder what line Noel proposes to take. I would suggest sodium pentothal. You get a lot out of them that way.”
    “The ‘truth drug’,” Ruth mused. “It always seems—rather cruel to me, dragging, a person’s secrets from them ruthlessly like that, perhaps against their will.”
    “One has to be ruthless in our profession on occasion,” Sara remarked, examining her well-kept fingernails with minute attention. “Especially with the criminal classes. People who are trying to hide something, for instance, don’t react normally to the usual methods.”
    Ruth flushed. Could Sara be suggesting that the girl she had picked up on the moors was a criminal? Briskly she thrust the suggestion aside.
    “Noel expected that there might be a report of an accident when he phoned the police,” she said, “but I haven’t had time to ask him what he has done. I’m hoping he’ll s tay over for a meal and not go dashing back to work till all hours without a bite,” she explained as she turned to put the potatoes on the electric cooker. “Will you stay, Sara?” she invited. “There’s quite enough for four.”
    “That girl would be far better over in the wards,” Sara said decisively, as if she could not let the subject of Ruth’s protégé e drop even to answer her invitation. “I can’t stay this evening,” she went on regretfully. “I’ve got a pile of corrections to wade through, test papers and the usual reports to check. Matron leaves almost everything like that to me these days,” she complained. “She takes it for granted that. I live only for my work, as she does.”
    “Never mind!” Ruth consoled. “You’ll disillusion her one of these days!”
    She was not quite sure what she meant by that, she mused, as she watched Sara walk away in the direction of the nurses’ home. Perhaps she meant that Sara would get married quite soon. She had done remarkably well in her chosen profession, rising to the position of ward sister and senior sister with amazing rapidity, and she was not quite thirty, but Ruth knew that she would never let professional advancement stand in the way of marriage.
    If Ruth had automatically expected Noel to marry Sara one day, she had kept that to herself, too, and her brother’s confidences had certainly never run to the subject of marriage, with Sara or anyone else.
    Ruth waited for him in the dining-room and she saw him come towards her across the hall with the same thoughtful expression that had been in his eyes when he had first come in.
    “Ruth,” he questioned, coming to the point immediately, “could you possibly cope with a patient in the house for a day or two?”
    S h e looked beyond him to the half-open door of the sitting-room. “You want to keep her here under constant observation?” she surmised.
    He nodded.
    “She can have the spare room for as long as you think fit,” Ruth agreed without the slightest hesitation. “I won’t mind a bit.”
    “It will mean a good deal of extra work for you, cooking meals and that sort of thing,” he warned. “If there’s any nursing to be done, of course, we can call in help from the hospital.”
    “Will she be able to take a normal diet?” Ruth asked as he followed her into the kitchen. “There’s some soup she can have now, and the remains of the chicken we had yesterday.”
    “There’s nothing whatever wrong with her appetite.” He was standing by the window looking out, not really seeing the scene in front of him but engrossed in the fascinating study of a new case. “Amnesia—the blotting out of memory—a forgetting,” he mused. “Names, identity, home, have all been swept away behind the dark curtain.” He turned abruptly. “Only those who have