I turned. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
“Yes.”
“Can you spare some time now, Miss Keate? There was—something I wanted to—ask you about.”
I hesitated. It seems to me that when anyone around St. Ann’s has a complaint it is brought to my ears and I was in no mood that morning to listen to complaints.
“I was just going to get some sleep, Higgins,” I said. “Will another time do?”
How often, since then, I have wished that I had stopped then and there. But I thought of nothing more important than leaky gutterpipes or the canna bulbs not doing well.
“Well—yes,” agreed Higgins slowly. Something in his tone made me regard him sharply, thinking that he seemed quite reluctant and perplexed. However, as I say, I was tired and sleepy and had already more than enough problems before me, so I took my way upstairs.
On the way I picked up the Sunday paper. The supplement had the hospital pictures again, groups of nurses, a sort of history of St. Ann’s, stressing its long years of service but winding up with a lurid résumé of the past few days, which is the way of Sunday supplements but not unpleasant. I even found a picture of myself taken some years ago when pompadours and bosoms were in style. It was not a flattering picture and neither was the caption below it, which described me as one of St. Ann’s oldest nurses! Oldest in point of service, it went on to say tactfully, but the picture dated me indisputably and I flung the paper in the waste basket and tried to compose myself to sleep. And, I might add, did not succeed.
I found the noon service in the little chapel remarkably well attended, with prayer books in evidence and the nurses turning out en masse. The young rector preached a rather nice sermon about “Be ye not afraid,” which I considered a little too apropos for comfort and good taste.
Sunday is usually a rather festive day in St. Ann’s but that Sunday was anything but pleasant. No visitors were permitted, which made the patients fretful and hard to please. Moreover, we could not prevent an almost constant stream of morbidly inclined sight-seers whose automobiles splashed along the muddy road in front of the hospital, and who stared through the fog and pointed with melancholy satisfaction.