"All right. Hasn't she been to see you?"
"I should hope not!" The nurse at the window, busy with the work in her lap, covertly glanced at her patient. His face was flushed and beclouded. "I won't have her come here—now remember that, Jim! But you might assure her that I am all right."
"Humph! Play buffer for you, is it?"
"Well, give a look in at the kiddies, anyway. They are not to blame."
"Right-o!" agreed Jim, and soon departed.
From that hour Sanderson found his nurse not quite the same as she had been. He soon recovered his usual cheery manner. Not so Belinda. She had raised a certain barrier between them, and that barrier he was unable to surmount.
Still sick, he peevishly laid it to the influence of the black-browed surgeon. Or was it that, now he was better, the nurse was merely following her usual method of "freezing" a too ardent patient?
He ventured a query to Miss Trivett one night; for although one could not really like the night nurse, she was trustworthy.
"I don't know what I've done to offend Miss Melnotte," Sanderson said honestly. "But she keeps me at a distance——"
"Oh, my! Little-boy-crying-for-the-moon!" the nurse said, half in scorn and half in sympathy. "Are you going to prove yourself no wiser than the rest of them? And you an aviator! Bah!"