Love Stories

Love Stories, by Mary Roberts
Rinehart

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts
Rinehart This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Love Stories
Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Release Date: March 26, 2005 [EBook #15473]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE
STORIES ***

Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

THE WORKS OF MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
LOVE STORIES

THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY Publishers NEW YORK
PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH GEORGE H. DORAN
COMPANY.
Copyright, 1919, By George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1912, 1913, 1916, by the Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1912, by The McClure Publications, Inc. Copyright, 1917,
by The Metropolitan Magazine Co.

CONTENTS
I TWENTY-TWO
II JANE
III IN THE PAVILION
IV GOD'S FOOL
V THE MIRACLE
VI "ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
VII THE GAME

LOVE STORIES

TWENTY-TWO
I

The Probationer's name was really Nella Jane Brown, but she was
entered in the training school as N. Jane Brown. However, she meant
when she was accepted to be plain Jane Brown. Not, of course, that she
could ever be really plain.
People on the outside of hospitals have a curious theory about nurses,
especially if they are under twenty. They believe that they have been
disappointed in love. They never think that they may intend to study
medicine later on, or that they may think nursing is a good and
honourable career, or that they may really like to care for the sick.
The man in this story had the theory very hard.
When he opened his eyes after the wall of the warehouse dropped, N.
Jane Brown was sitting beside him. She had been practising counting
pulses on him, and her eyes were slightly upturned and very earnest.
There was a strong odour of burnt rags in the air, and the man sniffed.
Then he put a hand to his upper lip--the right hand. She was holding his
left.
"Did I lose anything besides this?" he inquired. His little moustache
was almost entirely gone. A gust of fire had accompanied the wall.
"Your eyebrows," said Jane Brown.
The man--he was as young for a man as Jane Brown was for a
nurse--the man lay quite still for a moment. Then:
"I'm sorry to undeceive you," he said. "But my right leg is off."
He said it lightly, because that is the way he took things. But he had a
strange singing in his ears.
"I'm afraid it's broken. But you still have it." She smiled. She had a
very friendly smile. "Have you any pain anywhere?"
He was terribly afraid she would go away and leave him, so, although
he was quite comfortable, owing to a hypodermic he had had, he

groaned slightly. He was, at that time, not particularly interested in Jane
Brown, but he did not want to be alone. He closed his eyes and said
feebly:
"Water!"
She gave him a teaspoonful, bending over him and being careful not to
spill it down his neck. Her uniform crackled when she moved. It had
rather too much starch in it.
The man, whose name was Middleton, closed his eyes. Owing to the
morphia, he had at least a hundred things he wished to discuss. The
trouble was to fix on one out of the lot.
"I feel like a bit of conversation," he observed. "How about you?"
Then he saw that she was busy again. She held an old-fashioned
hunting-case watch in her hand, and her eyes were fixed on his chest.
At each rise and fall of the coverlet her lips moved. Mr. Middleton,
who was feeling wonderful, experimented. He drew four very rapid
breaths, and four very slow ones. He was rewarded by seeing her rush
to a table and write something on a sheet of yellow paper.
"Resparation, very iregular," was what she wrote. She was not a
particularly good speller.
After that Mr. Middleton slept for what he felt was a day and a night. It
was really ten minutes by the hunting-case watch. Just long enough for
the Senior Surgical Interne, known in the school as the S.S.I., to
wander in, feel his pulse, approve of Jane Brown, and go out.
Jane Brown had risen nervously when he came in, and had proffered
him the order book and a clean towel, as she had been instructed. He
had, however, required neither. He glanced over the record, changed
the spelling of "resparation," arranged his tie at the mirror, took another
look at Jane Brown,