Nurse for the Doctor Read Online Free PDF Page B

find some real sunshine. I feel as if I want to complete my cure—my spiritual as well as physical cure.” He regarded her a little strangely. “And when I get back I mean to take up the threads of my life where I left them all those weeks ago. A man is a poor thing without his work, and work is the important thing in life—at least, that’s the decision I’ve arrived at. Never again will I allow myself to be side-tracked or deluded because something else seems temporarily important. In future the whole of my interest is going to be given to—my work.”
    And he said it as if he had firmly made up his mind, and was dedicating himself to a future in which he would decline to do such a thing as fall in love—ever again.
    Looking at him in the watery rays of the sun that was trying to break through again she thought, not for the first time, that he had an excellent jaw, and his mouth was not the mouth of a man who could ever be really self-indulgent, or even look upon self as something to be indulged. He could be rigid about a thing once he made up his mind, inflexible where others might be weak, ascetic if asceticism would ultimately lead him to the right goal.
    She felt her heart grow a little heavy inside her, and she felt cold, in spite of the warmth that was struggling through.
    “Spain?” she echoed. “Spain would be nice—” But she sounded a little wistful.
    “Nice?” he caught her up. “Much more than nice, Josie! Wait until you’ve seen the effect of Spanish sunlight on a walled-in courtyard. Wait until you’ve seen the Spanish stars hanging like lamps in a sky like purple velvet! ... Wait until you’ve seen Palheiro’s villa!” A twinkle invaded his eyes. “Palheiro’s quite a charmer, by the way. A Spanish nobleman of the old school, with the easy manners of the new. Spanish mamas chase after him because he’s reputed to be enormously rich, but so far he’s declined to marry anyone.” His face hardened for an instant. “He’s probably got good sense.”

 
    CHAPTER IV
    Two weeks later Josie had the opportunity to decide for herself whether the Marquis de Palheiro was merely displaying good sense in refusing to be rushed into matrimony.
    He came to the hotel on the Costa Brava where the Duveen mother and son, accompanied by their youthful-looking nurse who had never before been out of England in her life, had decided to put up for a few days. He came to lunch, driving up in an enormously powerful car that was as black as Indian ink, and glittering with chromium. The car came to rest in the forecourt before the hotel, on to which the windows of the great glassed-in verandahs looked. Although it was a little late in the season, and the sea breezes could occasionally introduce a nip into the air, a fountain still played in an impressive marble basin in the forecourt, and the blaze of ordered flowers was something to take the breath away.
    Josie had already made the discovery that Spain was a land of contrasts—sometimes quite fierce color contrasts. There was the hard yellow of the sun, like molten gold, when it splashed across a wall as pristine in its whiteness as the snows on a mountain range; the vividness of a clump of Bougainvillaea, the clear, rich green of leaves forming a tracery. There was the bleached whiteness of the sands at midday, and the incredible blueness of the sea at all hours of the day.
    Josie thought that if the whole of Spain was anything like the Costa Brava it was a delightful land; a land where the soft throbbing of guitars seemed to have become part of the atmosphere, and women still wore mantillas, and tossed flowers to their admirers, heightening an impression of romance that was always around the corner; where the hour before dawn was like the coolness of chilled champagne, and the dawn itself something to watch for. Josie had watched it, alone on her balcony while the others slept. She had watched the brilliant spreading of the daylight once the sun had started