Seaside Hospital Read Online Free PDF Page B

painfully. “I only have an hour left. I came to see you. It’s peaceful here. Do you still go moonlight fishing?”
    “Aye, that I do,” he said, his smile fading as he noticed that she hadn’t answered his question. He had seen her once, in Derek Frenton’s new yacht. Simeon had been out in his old motorboat, its sail furled, riding sweetly and silently. The occupants of the yacht had not seen him. They had not been looking for dirty little fishing craft. They had their eyes elsewhere. That had been at the start of the season, a rare hot day in late spring, when Lisa and Derek had still been all in all to each other. “Want to come fishing, do you, lass?” he went on.
    “If it isn’t too late finishing, I’d love it,” Lisa said. “I expect my girlfriend would come too.”
    “If it’s the one who upset the screen on Matron when she came on her rounds that day, you’d best not bring her. Fine larky customer, that Nurse Thorley, I remember, though she fair do try and look quiet on the wards. It’s the real quiet ones I like to take out at night fishing with me.”
    Lisa grinned. So he had not forgotten Mary’s lapses when he had been in hospital.
    “Could you manage this day week, lass? Because if so, you don’t have to bring anyone. I got another passenger. Rare quiet chap. We’ll have a good run out to the Channel and back.”
    “I can’t get a late pass. I’ll have to be in by eleven,” she warned him.
    “Fair enough. My other passenger has to be back as well.”
    Lisa left old Simeon then, and walked along the shingle to a steeper flight of steps that led to the top of the cliff. Among her shopping she had bought a little foam rubber duck for one of the toddlers, a frightened wee mite who had never been away from his mother before; the mother could not come and stay with him as she was in the maternity wing, having a new baby.
    On impulse, Lisa slipped off her sandals and fastened them around her neck. Taking the little duck out of its wrappings, she set it on the water and paddled it along. It looked sweet on the glassy surface of the receding tide, but suddenly she realized it was being tugged out quickly to sea. She put out a hand to reach it, but her foot encountered nothing, and she drew back hastily, remembering too late that in the heavy battering of last winter’s seas, this part of the beach had dropped away sharply and was too deep for paddling. No one was in sight at this quiet end of the shore, and the little duck was fast becoming beyond hope of rescue.
    Then she heard a quiet chugging of an outboard motor behind her, and she looked around with relief. The tall man sitting with his back to the sun obligingly steered toward the toy, and reaching it, brought it inshore toward her. As he neared, she recognized him, and her thanks froze on her lips. It was Randall Carson.
    She blushed as his sardonic glance roved from her bare legs to the sandals slung around her neck.
    “Paddling with a rubber duck? Rather a juvenile way of spending your study hours, isn’t it, Nurse?” he asked, as he turned his craft outward again and chugged away.
    It was for remarks like those, slighting and hurtful, and that sardonic amusement of his, that Lisa cherished a special dislike for Randall Carson. They were worse even than his eternally picking on her for the mistakes she made when she was working with him.
    She told Mary about it, when she dropped into Lisa’s little room at bedtime that night.
    “Oh, take no notice of him, Lisa. He’s an old sourpuss,” Mary comforted. “Mind you, they do say that he’s had a pretty grim sort of life, so that may account for it.”
    “What do you mean?” Lisa wanted to know.
    “His parents were poor, and he had to work frightfully hard to qualify. No fun at all, like those fellows this afternoon, for instance. Then, not long after he came to Barnwell Bay, the tragedy happened.”
    “What tragedy? How is it you know so much about him?”
    “Because I enjoy