Nurse in Love by Jane Arbor

That girl? In the Fauntleroy lace?”
    Adam nodded. “The same.”
    “You astound me. I found her intelligent and charming, but she is so young !”
    “She is fully trained and C.M.B., and is more capable than any Ward Sister I’ve yet worked with.”
    “I can see she has your confidence. Well, give me time to get used to the idea of adding seeming teenagers to my staff, and then perhaps you’d like to put the proposition to her?”
    “Not yet.”
    “No, and of course not until you’ve decided one way or the other yourself. I’d like the two of you to make a professional team of it, if you could.”
    Adam said carefully: “Naturally I know very little of her circumstances or her future plans.”
    “Naturally,” Sir Paul agreed blandly. But he shot an acutely enquiring glance at Adam as he added: “And yet, you know, I’m surprised that with a girl like that you haven’t examined for yourself the possibilities of a different kind of harness from a professional one!”
    Adam smiled politely at the quip but did not reply. And with a chuckle and a: “Sorry, Adam. Below the belt, eh?” Sir Paul patted his shoulder and moved off.
    All night, between fitful, frustrated dreams, Kathryn had been blaming herself for not realising the danger of allowing Steven to draw her away from the crowds; for letting her pity for him betray her into the gentleness of that gesture which both he and the other man who had witnessed it could have read as an expression of love.
    It was sheer cruel chance that had brought Adam to the recess at that moment, but she would not let even that excuse her. For a quirk of memory reminded her that at almost their first meeting, when he had blamed her so bitterly on Steven’s behalf, she had recognised and admired the strength of the friendship which had driven him on. To him, then, Steven’s welfare had mattered more than anything. And at Barbara Thorley’s he had revealed to her how much it still mattered. Believing that she could serve Steven best by keeping away from him, Adam had been upon the point of asking her help in that, and he had checked in his purpose only upon her own hot, resentful retort.
    He had not known that as soon as she had made it she had resolved to keep faith with him in what he asked. She had been thrown into Steven’s company that day and she had known that they would have to meet again often. But she had resolved that she wouldn’t encourage him.
    And yet—and yet — at his first appeal to her pity she had yielded. So that, even if Adam had not been there to see that gesture of tenderness, she would still feel that she had broken an unspoken promise to him. And she had not even helped Steven. Panic-stricken, she had run away, leaving him to guess at her feeling for him, perhaps betraying him to Adam’s scorn for even thinking of approaching her again.
    Passingly she wondered why they all—she and Adam Brand and Thelma—should be so concerned to fend for Steven. Was it the primitive instinct of the strong to gather about the weak? Or, less creditably, was it that each of them derived a personal satisfaction when Steven turned particularly to him or her? In which case mightn’t it be better if he learned to stand upon his own feet, getting neither pity nor protection from any of them? But her mind was too fogged to follow that reasoning through.
    Once only during the night she asked herself what that scene might have told Adam about herself. She knew that it was the very last thing she wanted him to believe—that she was in love with Steven, or that she would marry him if he should ask her again. But did it matter what he believed about her, so long as he came to understand that her gesture towards Steven had been the merest impulse, and that friendship alone had betrayed her into an intimacy from which he had wanted to guard his friend?
    Yes, that was important. Hazily her mind pinned upon it—the only important thing. To explain to Adam Brand at the first