MILLS & BOON

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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHARITY RATTLED OFF the last few words of the Path Lab report, took the form out of the machine and reached for its cover. She was late by reason of Miss Hudson having to go to the dentist and Charity offering to finish off her reports for her. If she wasn’t to keep Sidney waiting she would have to get a move on. She got to her feet, a tall shapely girl with curly dark hair pinned into a careless french pleat, and a pretty face, and stretched and yawned widely, glad to be free from her typewriter at last. She yawned again and crossed the bare little office to the minuscule cupboard where the pair of them hung their things and made the tea, and did her face and poked at her hair. Charity, a contented girl, sometimes found herself at the end of a busy day wishing that she was somewhere else; somewhere exotic, dressed to kill and being plied with champagne by some man who adored her… So silly, she admonished her reflection, and surely she was old enough not to daydream. Especially as there was Sidney. It was regrettable, but she had found herself quite unable to daydream about him. He was everything a prospective husband should be: non-smoking, non-drinking, with a steady job in a building society and a nice little nest egg; he was a pleasant companion, too. They had known each other for so long that she wasn’t sure when the idea of marrying had turned from a vague possibility to a taken-for-granted fact. Certainly he had never actually proposed.

      She fetched her purse from the desk drawer, turned off the lamp and went out of the room, plunging at once into a narrow passage with a stone floor. It wound its way round the back of the hospital, a forgotten thoroughfare from Victorian times, only used by herself and Miss Hudson and anyone who delivered the reports, letters and treatment sheets, written for the most part in almost unreadable scrawls, which they deciphered and returned neatly typed, in an unending stream.

      The familiar sounds of hospital life and the faint but penetrating smell of disinfectant, floor polish and Harpic, nicely blended, caused her to wrinkle her charming nose; she hardly noticed it during the day, but somehow by the time she left for home, it had become a bit much.

      There were other people using the passage: porters, someone from X-Ray taking a short cut, a couple of nurses who shouldn’t be there at all, and the nice little man who went round the wards collecting specimens. She greeted them all cheerfully, opened the door leading to the entrance hall and whipped smartly through it. The entrance hall was vast; the Victorians may have stinted on the gloomy semi-basement rooms and endless gloomier corridors, but they had let themselves go on the committee rooms, consultants’ rooms and the entrance. From the outside, the front of the hospital resembled Euston Station, with more than a dash of the original Crystal Palace. The large glass doors opened on to a gloomy, marble-floored hall upon whose fairly lofty ceiling were depicted various scenes of a surgical or medical aspect, while round its dark oak-panelled walls stood an orderly row of dead and gone consultants, each on his plinth. Half-way down this symbol of Victorian ill-taste was the head porter’s box, where old Mr Symes spent his days, ruling the porters with a heavy hand and a fount of knowledge when it came to the hospital and its activities. He knew the nursing staff, the students, the housemen and the consultants, and they in their turn regarded him as a kind of symbol; Augustine’s without Symes was unthinkable.

      He looked up from his paper as Charity crossed the waste of marble towards the door, wished her a civil good evening and then got to his feet and reached back to take a handful of notes from the board behind him. The glass doors had been thrust open and a man had come in: Professor Wyllie-Lyon, Senior Medical Consultant, a pleasant, rather quiet giant of a man about whom the hospital grapevine could find very little to say. No one knew if he were married or where he lived—no one being the nursing staff who found his good looks and great size irresistible.

      He paused to take the messages Symes offered him, bade him a polite good evening and smiled at Charity. ‘You work late, Miss Graham. Are we so hard on you?’

      She stopped in front of him. ‘Oh, no, sir, it’s not that—Miss Hudson had the toothache and went to the dentist and there were one or two reports to finish.’

      She smiled at him in return; she liked him. True, his notes and letters were sometimes scribbled in an abominable scrawl which took all her wits to decipher, and he had a nasty habit of springing something urgent on them to be typed just as they had cleared their desks for the day, but he was always beautifully mannered. She knew a good deal more about him than the grapevine, too, but discretion was part of her job. Sharing a table with the nurses at dinner time, she listened to them guessing as to where he lived or if he were married and, if so, to whom, knowing quite well that he had a house in an elegant backwater—an expensive one, too, she guessed—tucked away behind Wimpole Street; he wasn’t married, either, but wild horses wouldn’t