The Box with Broken Seals | Page 5

"Do you come from the hospital?"
He shook his head and glanced behind her to be sure that the door was closed.
"Please do not think that my coming means any trouble, Miss Beverley," he said, "but if you look at me more closely you will perhaps recognise me. You will perhaps remember--a promise."
He stepped a little forward from his position of obscurity to where the strong afternoon sunlight found its subdued way through the Holland blinds. The politely interrogative smile faded from her lips. She seemed to pass through a moment of terror, a moment during which her thoughts were numbed. She sank into the chair which her visitor gravely held out for her, and by degrees she recovered her powers of speech.
"Forgive me," she begged. "The name upon the card should have warned me--but I had no idea--I was not expecting a visit from you."
"Naturally," he acquiesced smoothly, "and I beg you not to discompose yourself. My visit bodes you no harm--neither you nor any one belonging to you."
"I was foolish," she confessed. "I have been working overtime at the hospital lately--we have sent so many of our nurses to France. My nerves are not quite what they should be."
He bowed sympathetically. His tone and demeanour were alike reassuring.
"I quite understand," he said. "Still, some day or other I suppose you expected a visit from me?"
"In a way I certainly did," she admitted. "You must let me know presently, please, exactly what I can do. Don't think because I was startled to see you that I wish to repudiate my debt. I have never ceased to be grateful to you for your wonderful behaviour on that ghastly night."
"Please do not refer to it," he begged. "Your brother, I hope, is well?"
"He is well and doing famously," she replied. "I suppose you know that he is in France?"
"In France?" he repeated. "No, I had not heard."
"He joined the Canadian Flying Corps," she went on, "and he got his wings almost at once. He finds the life out there wonderful. I never receive a letter from him," she concluded, her eyes growing very soft, "that I do not feel a little thrill of gratitude to you."
He bowed.
"That is very pleasant," he murmured. "And now we come to the object of my visit. Your surmise was correct. I have come to ask you to redeem your word."
"And you find me not only ready but anxious to do so," she told him earnestly. "If it is a matter--pardon me--of money, you have only to say how much. If there is any other service you require, you have only to name it."
"You make things easy for me," he acknowledged, "but may I add that it is only what I expected. The service which I have come to claim from you is one which is not capable of full explanation but which will cause you little inconvenience and less hardship. You will find it, without doubt, surprising, but I need not add that it will be entirely innocent in its character."
"Then there seems to be very little left," she declared, smiling up at him from the depths of her chair, "but to name it. I do wish you would sit down, and are you quite sure that you won't have some tea or something?"
He shook his head gravely and made no movement towards the chair which she had indicated. For some reason or other, notwithstanding her manifest encouragement, he seemed to wish to keep their interview on a purely formal basis.
"Let me repeat," he continued, "that I shall offer you no comprehensive explanations, because they would not be truthful, nor are they altogether necessary. In Ward Number Fourteen of your hospital--you have been so splendid a patroness that every one calls St. Agnes's your hospital--a serious operation was performed to-day upon an Englishman named Phillips."
"I remember hearing about it," she assented. "The man is, I understand, very ill."
"He is so ill that he has but one wish left in life," Jocelyn Thew told her gravely. "That wish is to die in England. Just as you are at the present moment in my debt for a certain service rendered, so am I in his. He has called upon me to pay. He has begged me to make all the arrangements for his immediate transportation to his native country." She nodded sympathetically.
"It is a very natural wish," she observed, "so long as it does not endanger his life."
"It does not endanger his life," her visitor replied, "because that is already forfeit. I come now to the condition which involves you, which explains my presence here this afternoon. It is also his earnest desire that you should attend him so far as London as his nurse."
The look of vague apprehension which had brought a questioning frown into Katharine Beverley's