“Well, who are you?” she demanded sharply. “Whoever you are, get me my clothes, unless you want me to walk out of here in this monstrosity of a garment.”
“I’m Nurse Frazier, Mrs. Crossett,” said Claire quietly. “Nurse Welch has gone for Dr. Massey. He’ll be here very soon.”
“Oh, so you know who I am?” Obviously Elaine wasn’t surprised that this should be so.
“I recognized you from your picture in the paper this morning,” Claire answered pleasantly, adjusting the covers that Elaine had disturbed.
There was a shocked murmur from Elaine, and her dark blue eyes widened.
“My picture was in the paper this morning?” she repeated, and added with a faint touch of anxiety, “Oh, of course, on the social page — ”
“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Crossett. It was on the front page,” Claire told her.
The alarm deepened in Elaine’s lovely eyes.
“The front page? But why should it have been?” she stammered.
“Oh, it’s routine that when a patient is brought in for emergency treatment a report goes to the police, and the newspapers get it,” Claire told her. “And of course you are prominent, and naturally the newspapers would make a front page story of your accident.”
Elaine studied her sullenly.
“What makes you think it was an accident?” she demanded.
“Well, I can’t believe a woman as young and beautiful and wealthy as you would want to destroy your life, with everything you have to live for,” Claire answered quite honestly.
For a moment Elaine stared at her as though dumbfounded.
“I don’t suppose it could ever occur to you that one could become so bored — ” she began, and broke off and suddenly laughed, an ugly, mirthless laugh that was the epitome of bitterness. “Everything I have to live for! If you only knew what a laugh that is!”
A moment later Dr. Massey came in swiftly and Elaine stared at him, wide-eyed, as he stood beside the bed, his fingers on her pulse, his smile warm and friendly.
“Now what’s all this nonsense about your wanting to go home, Mrs. Crossett? Don’t you like our hospital?” There was gentle raillery in his voice as he took the chart that Maude extended, while Claire lingered near the door, filling her eyes with the sight of him.
“Who are you?” demanded Elaine, studying him intently.
“I’m your doctor,” Dr. Massey explained, and his friendly smile was a white flash in his darkly handsome face. “I like to take at least part of the credit for saving your life last night. And now you want to rush off and leave us. Is that gratitude?”
“I didn’t ask you to save my life,” Elaine reminded him sullenly, her eyes still devouring him. “But thanks, anyway.”
“Just part of the job, the service the hospital is happy to render,” Dr. Massey assured her, and there was a faintly mocking note in his voice to match the twinkle in his brown eyes. “You don’t really want to go home, do you?”
Elaine’s eyes were intent, and suddenly she smiled and settled herself a little more comfortably against her pillows.
“Certainly not. Whoever said I did?” she answered firmly. “I may be here for weeks and weeks — who knows? I like it here.”
“That’s good,” Dr. Massey laughed. “But I’m afraid we can’t allow you to stay here that long. A week should see you back on your feet and ready to leave us.”
Elaine studied him, and suddenly she smiled happily.
“Then I’ll buy the hospital and make it my permanent home and you shall be my permanent doctor,” she assured him.
“You’re not looking forward to requiring a permanent doctor, I hope, and settling down to semi-invalidism?” Dr. Massey asked solemnly.
“The thought has a certain appeal,” Elaine assured him.
“Well, we’ll talk about that later,” Dr. Massey told her as he turned toward the door. “I’ll look in on you in the morning.”
“You do that, Doctor,” purred Elaine. “I shall look forward to it.”
Demurely Claire held the door open for him, followed him out into the corridor and closed the door gently behind them.
“That’s a dangerous woman, Rick, my lad,” she said quietly.
Dr. Massey’s hand reached for hers and folded it tightly in his own, and his eyes took her in with a look so caressing that she had the heady feeling that he was kissing her.
“What woman? I know only one woman in the world, Treasure, and that’s you!” His voice was low and husky and brought the color in a warm tide to her face.
“That’s the way I want it to be, Rick, always!” Her own voice was pitched low, threaded with ardor, and her fingers curled even more tightly about his.
“It will be, dearest — I promise,” he told her tenderly.
For a moment they were content just to stand there, their hands clenched tightly together, so that she could feel the warmth and tenderness curling about her quivering heart.
“I want to kiss you.” His voice was a thread of sound. “I want so terribly to kiss you.”
She leaned toward him and then glanced guiltily about the corridor where nurses were going busily to and fro getting their patients ready for supper, nurses were going off duty, other nurses were going on duty, and the busy, brisk, somewhat self-conscious young internes carried their small black bags, and here and there a candy-striper was very busy and self-important.
Claire smiled up at him and drew a long deep breath.
“Well, I’m afraid we’d fracture some of the hospital’s most stringent rules and regulations, Doctor,” she murmured softly for his ears alone. “But if you’re off duty — ”
“I’m not, hang it. Not until midnight. But if you are, maybe we could have coffee?” he suggested hopefully.
“That would be lovely.” She smiled up at him.
A little later, at a corner table in the coffee shop, he glanced about him distastefully at the groups of hospital personnel, the sprinkling of anxious relatives awaiting word about patients whom they had come to see, and suddenly he scowled.
“I have seldom,” he told her grimly, “known two people in love who had so much trouble finding a moment of privacy.”
She slid her hand to him beneath the edge of the table, and her eyes were warm and sweet as she whispered, “Two more months, darling, and then — ”
He nodded above his cooling coffee, and beneath the edge of the table his hand caressed hers, lingering over the ring finger, his thumb brushing it.
“And I haven’t even given you a ring.” He seemed to feel a real shame at that.
“Well, of course not.” Claire laughed softly. “Don’t you remember? You wanted to and I dared you to spend the money! We’re going to need every cent we can rake and scrape together, darling, for the equipment we’ll need. Since you don’t want to be assigned to a town where all the equipment and a house and office and such will be furnished — ”
“If we’re going to set up shop on our own, darling, let’s see to it that we are on our own!” he cut in swiftly, and she knew how much this meant to him. “If there’s one thing a young doctor setting up practice on his own needs, it’s
freedom,
not to be beholden to some town board to do as he’s told.”
Claire, eager to rouse him from his bitter mood, managed a small smile, a teasing light in her eyes.
“Is that really the most important thing a young doctor needs?”
Momentarily puzzled, Dr. Massey scowled at her.
“Can you think of anything he needs more?” he demanded.
“Well, I’ve heard that a good office nurse is important, too,” she mocked lightly.
Beneath the edge of the table his hand closed so tightly on hers that she barely managed not to wince with the pain; yet not for anything in the world would she have had that pain lessened by the loosening of that grip.
“It’s going to be a long, hard pull, honey,” he told her huskily.
“You aren’t by any chance trying to jilt me, are you?”
“What a stupid thing to say!” There was an edge of anger in his voice as though he considered the question an insult.
“Then stop trying to scare me off,” she answered briskly. “As if I didn’t know how long it takes to get a practice established, or how little money a general practitioner in a small town can hope for. Don’t you suppose I
know?
Have you forgotten my father and mother started out just the way you and I are going to start?”
He was silent for a moment, and once again his hand held hers in that achingly close grip.
“Funny,” he said very softly, “how a girl can make a man feel like the most humble creature that ever cluttered the face of the earth — and in the same breath make him feel like a king! Thanks, Precious.”
Radiant, bright-eyed, a lovely smile touching, her soft mouth, Claire murmured, “You’re welcome, darling.”
A week later, the local newspapers gave front page space to the elopement of Elaine Crossett, prominent young socialite, with Dr. Richard Massey, credited with having saved her life from a recent overdose of barbiturates.
Claire, huddled in her nurse’s cape, ran from the nurse’s dormitory in the bitter cold of that winter morning into the main building of the big hospital. As she crossed the big lobby, there was a small group of nurses with their heads bent above the morning newspaper, but she only smiled at them and tossed a gay greeting as she hurried into the elevator.
“Cold outside.” She laughed at Pete, the elderly operator who always had a cheerful greeting for her but who, this morning, merely nodded as he sent the elevator aloft to the Women’s Wing.
She glanced along the corridor as she left the elevator and her heart sank a little. There was no sign of Rick, and she went on to her patient.
Amanda looked at her keenly as she and the night-duty nurse conferred for a moment over the chart, and then the night-duty nurse, with only a brusque word, hurried out of the room closing the door behind her.
Claire said gaily, “You’re looking fine this morning, Miss Dawson. You must have had a comfortable night, and I’m so glad.”
“You look pretty fresh and beamish yourself, my girl,” said Amanda grumpily, and eyed her curiously. “I take it you haven’t seen the morning paper?”
“I’m afraid not,” Claire said. “I overslept — ”
Amanda took up the paper, held it for a moment and then said reluctantly, “I wish there was an easier way for you to learn this, Claire. But I suppose there isn’t. Here.”
Puzzled, Claire took the paper folded to show a story on the front page and read it, the color seeping from her face, her eyes going wide as her heart died agonizingly within her.
Amanda watched her, pity and anger striving for ascendancy in her eyes as she saw Claire sway a little and then slide into a chair and raise her face to meet Amanda’s face.
“Oh, but — why — this can’t be true. There’s some sort of hideous mistake — ” she whispered piteously.
“I’m afraid not, Claire.”
Claire’s shaking hands crumpled the newspaper, and she caught her lip between her teeth and bit down until a tiny drop of blood showed there.
“Oh — but Rick — he couldn’t — ” she stammered faintly, even while she was thrusting back the ugly conviction that he could, that he had. Elaine, with her fragile blonde beauty, most of all, Elaine with her great wealth — and Rick had so hated being poor —
For a little while she sat in silence, fighting the deadly wave of nausea that threatened her, fighting off the threat of fainting because nurses were trained to cope with emergencies, even such emergencies as this! Only there couldn’t be another like this! When everything a girl has dreamed of died a lingering death in her heart, when the man on whom she had centered all her hopes and dreams, the man to whom she had given all her heart, threw the gift back in her face and went off with some other woman.
Amanda waited, sick with pity for the girl. And at last Claire drew a deep, hard breath and squared her shoulders.
“That’s the girl,” said Amanda hearteningly. “It hurts, I know. It happened to me. Not quite so brutally, but just as devastatingly. So you have to make up your mind that you were in love with the man you thought he was, not the man he turned out to be.”
“I don’t know how to do that — ” It was a small frantic wail.
“It takes time,” Amanda told her heavily, “a lot of time. And every step of the way hurts.”
Claire sat very still, and Amanda studied her.
“You didn’t have any warning that it was going to happen?”
Claire made a little restrained gesture of dismissal.
“But how could I? She wasn’t my patient — I only saw her once — ”
“He didn’t say anything?”
Claire shook her head. She felt as though she were smothering in a thick, foul darkness that she could not escape. Amanda went on watching her, and her eyes showed her sympathy with Claire’s pain and bewilderment.
And then Amanda swore: a loud, round oath.
“Oh, but you mustn’t say that,” Claire replied miserably. “I — well, he isn’t altogether to blame. He so hated being poor; and she is very rich and very beautiful — ”
“And if you want to wait around for him,” Amanda said brutally, “he’ll probably come sneaking back to you with his tail between his legs as soon as she gets tired of him, and you can have him back if you want him.”
Claire shrank from the brutality of the words and put her hands over her face.
“Elaine never stays married to a man more than six months,” Amanda went on, trying to cauterize the bitter wound dealt to Claire. “If he’s smart — and it looks as though he has an eye to the main chance for himself — he’ll insist she make a substantial settlement on him before he agrees to a divorce — ”
“Oh, don’t!” Claire could not endure the ugliness of the picture.
“You may as well face it, my dear, because that’s what will happen.” Amanda pursued her relentlessly. “So if you have the patience — and the lack of pride — to wait for him and take him back — ”
“I don’t! At least — I don’t think I do — ”
“Good girl!” said Amanda approvingly. “Then what are you going to do?”
Claire looked at her with wide, dazed eyes.
“Do?” she repeated helplessly.
“Of course you have the entire sympathy of everybody in the hospital — ”
“I don’t want to be pitied!”
“Of course you don’t,” Amanda answered. “But you will be. Everybody will hate him and feel sorry for you, so the thing for you to do is go away from the hospital — ”