THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE Read Online Free Page A

put her in here, can’t you? I don’t want to put her under any obligation.”
    “I see,” said the nurse. “We’ll fix that up all right. It’s awfully fine of you to do all this for a stranger, and you can count on me.”
    He looked at her wistfully.
    “If there is anything else I could do, I’d be glad,” he said. “It seems a pity we don’t know where to find her friends. I don’t suppose she’ll be able to tell us anything tonight.”
    “No,” said the nurse, thoughtfully. “Maybe not even tomorrow. It might be best just to let her alone and let her rest. You can’t always tell about these cases.”
    “I wonder, said Greg almost shyly, “if I should leave you my telephone number, would you call me in case you found out, or there was anything at all that I could do to help? In the night or anytime. There’s a telephone in my room. It wouldn’t bother me a bit.”
    “Sure, I’ll let you know if there is any change or anything you can do. But I guess you needn’t worry. The doctor seemed to think her heart was pretty good. And I’ll be right here all night.”
    “That’s good!” he said and gave her a relieved smile.
    So Greg went down and arranged for the private room, paying a week in advance.
    “If she doesn’t need it that long, you can put some other little stranger in there after she is gone,” he said happily, and swung off down the street to his hotel, thinking about the little, white-faced girl lying in the hospital bed.
    It seemed a strange homecoming, almost the first thing to find this girl sitting over there just where he and his mother had picked violets. And now it seemed as though he could not do anything for himself until he knew the fate of this poor little stranger.
    He went into the dining room and ate a good dinner, surprised to find that it was well on toward eight o’clock. Why, it had been still daylight when he took that girl to the hospital!
    While he ate, he was thinking about the hospital. He remembered various bronze tablets he had seen about on the walls as he waited for his receipt to be signed at the office.
    Wouldn’t it be a nice thing for him to endow one of those rooms so it could be used for strangers? He could put up a tablet on the door with his mother’s name, a memorial to her. Call it the Mary Sterling Memorial Room for Strangers. He would enjoy doing that with some of his new money. It would somehow give his mother a part in it. And she would have liked that. She was always doing beautiful things for lonely people. Perhaps he could get that very room the little girl was in tonight! That would be nice. The girl who had been sitting alone in the very spot where his mother used to pick violets would be the first one to lie in the room endowed to her memory. He would do it! The first thing tomorrow morning, he would go over to the hospital and arrange it! He would get the bronze tablet made and put on the door right away. Then if the girl was worried about his paying for her room, there wouldn’t be any trouble. It would just be a free room for strangers.
    The idea made him quite happy, and after he had finished his dinner, he went out and walked beside the fountain in the little park, strolling past the bench where the girl had sat, even sitting down upon it a moment to wonder why she had sat there and what had happened that had brought her into such a sorrowful situation.
    As he got up, his foot struck against something in the grass, something soft and yielding that slid across the pavement as he hit it.
    He stooped and picked it up wonderingly. It was a flat purse with a strap across the back, one of the kind that most girls carried. It had a look of thinness about it that betokened nothing inside. He took it over and stood thoughtfully. Could that belong to the girl he had picked up, and could she possibly have dropped it as she fell?
    He went back and laid it down again just where he had found it, figuring out just how it might have fallen from