against the glass, and her eyes filled with bitter tears. For perhaps the thousandth time in the last few months she told herself that she would leave the Thatched House, forget Mrs. Garlett and her tiresome exactions, and, above all, forget Harry Garlett.

20

Harry Garlett? She did not require to shut her eyes to visualize the tall, still young-looking man whom the sick woman upstairs called husband. Every feature, every distinctive line about his good-looking, oftener merry than sad, alert expression of face, was printed on the tablets of Agatha’s tormented, unhappy heart.

Why was it that she, a proud woman, and, until she had met Harry Garlett, a cold woman, cared as she had come to care for this man? Garlett was not nearly as clever as many of the men with whom her work had brought her in contact during the war and since. The great surgeon whose favourite nurse she had become in the oddly managed, private war hospital, where all the square pegs had been forced into round holes, had shown her unmistakably that he was violently attracted by her dark, aloof beauty, but, far from being pleased, she had been bitterly distressed at what she had regarded as an insult.

Memories crowded thick upon her. She remembered cutting the bloodstained uniform off an unconscious form, and her thrill of surprise when she had read on his disc the most unusual name of Garlett—the second name by which she, herself, had been christened—she had never been able to discover why.

It was true, she had saved, not his life, but his bowling arm. And oh, how grateful he had been—then! At once they had fallen into the way, at first in joke, of calling each other “Cousin Harry” and “Cousin Agatha.” But there had been no love passages between them. He had at once told her that he was a married man, and very soon, also, she had come to understand that he was not “that sort.”

The war had been over some months when one day, by one of those chances which often deflect the whole of a human existence, they had run up against one another in a London street. She had asked him to come back to the modest rooms she occupied in Bloomsbury, and it was there 21that he had told her his wife was now a complete invalid, that she refused to have a nurse, and that it was difficult to get even a lady housekeeper who would satisfy her.

21

“Would you like me to try and find you some one?” she had asked. Eagerly he had caught at the suggestion, and that same night she had written and 

 Prev. P 19/292 next