You Took My Heart by Elizabeth Hoy

chasing the bouncing, popping white balls. There was warmth in here, an d the music of the radio, and young voices laughing, calling. It was safe and bright and reassuring. Hungrily, Joan sensed the homely atmosphere.
    “Are you ready, Gemma?” she cried, serving her ball with smashing force across the net.
    “Pig!” groaned Gemma, and missed it.
    Joan served again. A fault this time. And Garth could go hang for all she cared, she told herself school-girlishly, inelegantly. Garth’s affairs were as nothing to her any more. Nothing at all. Let the Millet bait him, pester him, trap him if she liked into admitting the relationship he strove so curiously to keep secret. Why didn’t he face the world like a man anyway, and give Vera the position that was rightfully hers? Garth, of all people, behaving in this mean, extraordinary fashion! It was almost impossible to believe, and yet it was true. Her blue eyes were wild suddenly, not seeing the green table any more, nor the bouncing little ball.
    “Joan Langden,” called Gemma reprovingly as she missed her sixth ball in succession. “What’s the matter with you tonight? Are you supposed to be playing ping-pong or just beating the air?”
    “Beating the air,” said Joan with a crazy little laugh. “That just about expresses it, Gemma, darling. Beating the air!”
    * * * *
    Then it was winter suddenly and very definitely. In the early mornings the little pink nurses shivered as they ran across the blustery square, huddled now in their serviceable thick blue cloaks, their heads bent before the flurries of rain and buffetings of wind. The plane trees and the sycamores stood stripped save for a few ragged, disconsolate leaves, and the pigeons huddled together for warmth moaning softly. Inside the great hospital the steam heat was turned on and the ward fires lighted, blossoming banks of flame and crimson in the big grates at the end of the long, pleasant rooms. There were chrysanthemums now in the vases, brown and gold and creamy, smelling a little tonicky and bitter after the summer roses. There were extra blankets on the neat beds and crimson dressing jackets for the women in Dale Ward.
    And with a start one morning Joan realized that her days on this momentous first floor of hers were almost over. She had served her initial three months. She was no longer a novice. Her preliminary examination was now safely behind her, and her long weekend holiday in front of her. At the end of each three months of duty and before you were changed to another floor you were entitled to five whole days’ holiday. That was one of the nice things about St. Angela’s.
    Joan, trying to feel as enthusiastic about it as she ought to have done, realized with a pang that she had nowhere to go for her five days’ leave. A wave of pure homesickness washed over her. Longingly now she thought of the old red-walled rectory at Dipley, of the country lanes deep in fallen crimson leaves, of the great sweep of the marshes still ragged with blackberry vines and trails of yellowing bracken. It would have been good to go home, she reflected ... if there had still been a home to go to! Bravely she listened to the other girls making their plans, and tried hard to think up some plan for herself. She might go to Epsom to a distant and rather crotchety spinster cousin. Or she might just stay in London, put up at some quiet boarding house and have breakfast in bed and visit museums and cinemas all day But somehow, neither of these alternatives was really thrilling.
    Then one morning, just in the nick of time, there was the letter waiting for her in the rack outside the breakfast room with its big, generous handwriting and Dipley postmark. It was from Mrs. Perros—Garth’s mother. Joan flushed with pleasure as she read it. Mrs. Perros had written to remind her that she had promised them a visit on her first really, long weekend. They were impatient to see her. Dipley was still looking very lovely and autumnal,