“This way. ‘I’ve not been able to answer your kind letter, because I have had to play nurse for some three or four weeks to a very fretful and exacting patient.’ Have you written that?”
“No,” said Doris, bending over her desk till her curls fell in a tangle over her white cheeks. “I do not like to,” she protested at last, with an attempt at naivete which seemed real enough to him.
“Well, leave out the fretful if you must, but keep in the exacting. I have been exacting, you know.”
Silence, broken only by the scratching of the stubborn, illy-directed pen.
“It’s down,” she whispered. She said, afterward, that it was like writing with a ghost looking over one’s shoulder.
“Then add, ‘Mr. Brotherson has had a slight attack of fever, but he is getting well fast, and will soon—, Do I run on too quickly?”
“No, no, I can follow.”
“But not without losing breath; eh, Doris?”
As he laughed, she smiled. There was a heroism in that smile, Oswald Brotherson, of which you knew nothing.
“You might speak a little more slowly,” she admitted.