Fate Is Remarkable. Betty Neels

is, I’m glad we split up before I found out what a …’

      He caught her belligerent eye. ‘A what?’ she enquired with icy calm. ‘I should be careful what you say, Steven—I’ll not hesitate to slap you again!’

      He flung away. ‘I wish you joy, that’s all I can say!’ he shouted, as he strode through the empty waiting hall. She watched him go. He was very good-looking, and when he wasn’t angry, charming too. She sighed and went to her dinner, wondering why he should wish her joy.

      Dr van Elven’s clinic was, as usual, splitting at the seams. Sarah, nipping from one patient to the other, weighing them, taking them to the Path. Lab., to X-ray, helping them in and out of endless garments, wished that he wasn’t quite such a glutton for work. She’d had to send two of her nurses up to the wards for the afternoon because a number of the staff were off with ‘flu. Now and again, when she made a sortie into the waiting hall for another patient, she glimpsed Staff at the other end with the one junior nurse they had been left with; they were busy in Gynae too. She went back into the consulting room to find Dr van Elven dealing, with commendable calm, with the attack of hysterics which his patient had sprung on him.

      Dick Coles went as soon as they had finished and Sarah began to tidy up, although she longed for tea. It would be too late to go to the Sisters’ sitting room; she would have to make her own when she got to her room.

      The doctor was sitting at the desk, absorbed in something or other. Sarah supposed that he was in no hurry to go home—it wasn’t as if there was a wife waiting for him … She finished at length, picked up the pile of notes she intended dropping into the office on her way, and went to the door. When she reached it she said, ‘Good night, sir,’ then stopped short when he said ‘Come back here, Sarah, and sit down. I want to talk to you.’

      She did as she was asked, because when he spoke in that quiet voice she found it prudent to obey him. She sat in the chair facing him, the notes piled on her lap; she was tired and thirsty and a little untidy, but her face was serene. She looked at him across the desk, smiling a little, because in the last few days she had come to regard him as a friend.

      He sat back, meeting and holding her glance with his own, but without the smile. He said, ‘Sarah, will you marry me?’