Nurse in Waiting Read Online Free PDF

you would go all briskly professional and show the courage of your conviction that all that dog was too much of a good thing, or whether you would back down. You backed down, of course. I was disappointed in you.”
    “Indeed!” Joanna did not know whether to be annoyed or amused as he went on calmly:
    “Yes. And you needn’t suppose Shuan would have been really hurt. She would merely have enjoyed a fight. We all do. Haven’t you heard of that as being a characteristic of our race?”
    “Yes, I have. But I didn’t know you indulged it in your private lives. Nor that it would be considered quite fair to involve a stranger who couldn’t be expected to know the rules of the game!” retorted Joanna.
    The blue eyes flashed mockingly. “But my dear Joanna, in an Irish fight there are no ‘rules of the game’! The only concern of anybody is whether it is a private affair, or whether anyone can join in! Your own cartoonists have been telling you that for years!”
    Baffled as to how far to take him seriously, Joanna gave it up and was saved from further argument by the appearance at the door of the fat cook who had shown her to her room.
    Together they worked at the task of making her patient comfortable for the night, and then Joanna went to her room to change for dinner.
    While she dressed she remembered her cavalier of Tulleen station—Justin McKiley—and his suggestion that she might want to seek at the Dower House some light relief from her job at Carrieghmere.
    She smiled to herself. Was it possible that he guessed some of the difficulties she was going to encounter at what he called “The House” before she became used to its c asual, unconventional atmos p here and to the moods of her patient? Perhaps that h ad been his method of holding out a friendly hand to a stranger; perhaps, too, she would be glad to take advantage of it one day even though at first she had not been sure that she liked him.
    Remembering the chilly atmosphere of the dining - room, she put on a warm dark frock and went downstairs to find that Shuan was there, wearing a grey woollen dress which was too colourless for her and In which she looked gauche and slightly uncomfortable. Mrs. Carnehill had merely discarded the check apron and had the appearance of having powdered her nose too hastily.
    She seemed to have recovered her spirits, and at sight of Joanna she smiled warmly.
    “D’you see now,” she asked rhetorically, “what a help you have been to me already! I’ve been able to catch up on work which should have been done days ago, and when I looked in on Roger before I came in to dinner he seemed quite cheerful!”
    “I’m glad of that,” said Joanna, not without irony. Cheerful—at my expense! was what she was thinking.
    “Yes. You know, I ought to be frank with you and tell you that when the suggestion of having a nurse for Roger was first m ention ed by Dr. Beltane and backed up by Colonel Kimstone, I didn’t like the idea at all. Maybe I was even a bit jealous at the thought of anyone else—a stranger—helping to look after him! But now I believe it will be good for him to have him someone as fresh and young as you are.”
    Shuan’s head, which had been bent over her soup, came up sharply. Mrs. Carnehill looked at her questioningly and then, with a smile, reached over to give the girl’s cheek a gentle pinch.
    “There, alannah!” she said. “We know Roger has you too! But between us, we haven’t got him to the point where he is able to get about again and so be free of the lot of us. Maybe now, with Joanna to help us, we’ll see him improve beyond recognition!”
    It was clear to Joanna that Mrs. Carnehill was courageously trying to convince herself that a hope she had cherished for a long time was about to be fulfilled. And she began to wish, both for the older woman’s sake and her own, that Roger Carnehill’s illness was an acute one, instead of one over which hung, like an ominous warning, that suggestion of