“Your business! Why is it your business? You are not a professional nurse, are you?”
“No, sir, though they offered to pay me to-day,” and she flushed with indignation as she said it.
“Well, don’t be angry if they did. Why shouldn’t you have a week’s wage for a week’s work? I suppose you like to earn something, like the rest of us.”
“Because I don’t choose to,” answered Joan, tapping the floor with her foot: “I’d rather starve. It is my fault that you got into this trouble, and it is an insult to offer me money because I am helping to nurse you out of it.”
“Well, there is no need to excite yourself about it. I have no doubt they thought that you would take a different view, and really I cannot see why you should not. Tell me what happened on the night that they gave me up: it interests me.”
Then in a few graphic words Joan sketched the scene so vividly, that Henry seemed to see himself lying unconscious on the bed, and sinking fast into death while the doctors watched and whispered round him.
“Were you there all the time?” he asked curiously.
“Most of it, till I was of no further use and could bear no more.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went to my room.”