“Pennington Wise, if you’ve lost your mind, I’ll take you to a modern sanitarium,—I don’t want to go off and leave you here in this little one-horse hospital!”
“Hush up, Zizi, don’t chatter! Miss Morton,—h’m——”
Zizi kept silent in utter exasperation. She knew Wise well enough to be sure he was on the trail of a real discovery, but her impatience could scarcely stand his mutterings and his air of suppressed excitement.
However, there was nothing to do but wait for his further elucidation and when at last he closed the books and looked up at her, his face was fairly transfigured with joyous expectancy.
“Come on, girl,” he cried, “come on.”
He rose, and, as Zizi followed, they went back to the superintendent’s office.
“Can you tell us, Doctor Hasbrook,” Wise asked, “where we can find two nurses who were here twenty years ago? One was named Black and one Morton.”
This was a matter of definite record, and Hasbrook soon informed them that Nurse Black had died some years ago but that Nurse Morton had married and was still living in Greenvale.
“Thank Heaven,” murmured Wise as he took the address of Mrs Briggs, who had been Nurse Morton.
To her house they then went, Zizi now quite content to trudge along by the detective’s side, without asking further questions. She knew she would learn all in due time.