“Although your coming to see me like this is not at all in order, Miss Bower, I shall not be sorry to have a little talk with you!” he exclaimed, moving his chair just a little forward.
As he did this, Jean Bower, unaware that she was doing it, moved her chair just a little back.
“And so,” he went on, in a jocular tone, “you are the pretty young lady who has brought all this trouble about?”
Poor Jean! She felt as if this man, whom she had thought of as a friend, had struck her straight between the eyes. She made no answer to the half-question, and only gazed at him affrightedly.
“You are by profession a nurse, are you not?” he asked abruptly. He felt annoyed that she had not “played up.”
“No, I am not a nurse,” she spoke in a very low tone.
“But I have seen a picture of you, a very delightful picture, it is, too!—in a nurse’s dress.”
Jean Bower looked bewildered; then a painful flush came over her face. She also, for her misfortune, had seen the page now lying on Sir Harold’s table.
“The papers have published a head of me taken out of a group of V. A. D.’s,” she said quickly. “I acted as secretary for a while at a war hospital.”
“That’s why you were in France at the hospital to which Harry Garlett was taken when wounded in 1917.”