“Yes. Honest! That’s sweet for her, if you ask me.”
“Jumping Jehosophat! You think she did it?”
“No. Of course not. Dr. Cub Sterling was the doctor on all of the cases.”
At the mention of his name the conversation she had just been hearing re-echoed in Rose Standish’s mind and she looked up just in time to catch the shrug of the girl’s thin shoulders and her smirk.
“Did he?”
“How should I know?” the girl shrugged again.
Rose Standish closed her book and rose. She wanted air, and plenty of it. Ever since the second year of her training she had had a very secret passion for Cub Sterling. Ever since that time he caught her on the stairway behind the pharmacy kissing ... she blushed when she thought about it ... Tony Watson, one of his internes ... and never told anybody, and then when Tony had pneumonia and died, he had let her help to nurse him and ... be with him ... at the last.
She reached the sun-parlor of the Nurses’ Home and collapsed into a chair. After all these five years the thought of Tony could do that to her! After all these five years ... and it was because that thought could turn her body to liquid soap that she still was so deeply grateful to Cub Sterling. He was white as chalk and always had been. Gold through and through ... and those student nurses suspected him of murdering patients. The dirty cats! The rotten little worms! The nasty pigs!
Why, when he found her in Tony’s arms halfway down that pitch-black stairway, he had pretended he didn’t recognize either of them. He had laughed and said, “My mistake!”
And then when he had reached the lower doorway, before he opened it, he turned ... she could hear his voice, even now....