Consulting Surgeon by Jane Arbor

Author:Jane Arbor [Arbor, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

She broke off so sharply that Ned looked at her in questioning alarm. But her face betrayed nothing. Not for Ned’s eyes nor for anyone’s was that revealing, blinding flash of knowledge which had checked her whole train of thought. Later, she knew, her heart must face its meaning, its whole implication to her life. But not now. ‘Now,’ she prayed, ‘let Ned not guess—any more than I did myself a moment or so ago—that I am refusing him for any other reason than that I don’t love him—that for both of us it wouldn’t do.’

Ned was saying: “I only know that I like being with you and talking to you more than anyone else. Isn’t that enough?”

How could she make him understand that it was not? She said: “You know I like being with you too. We are friends, and I value that. I don’t want to lose it. So is there any reason why we shouldn’t go on as before—that is, if you want to, Ned?”

He stared at her in surprise. “Why shouldn’t I want to?”

“I don’t know,” she smiled gratefully. “Except that, for some men, asking a girl to marry them and being refused would mean the end of everything pleasant that had gone before.”

“For me it doesn’t.” Ned touched her hand as it lay upon the table. “We’re still friends—aren’t we?”

After that there remained only a guilty counting of the minutes to their parting. Coralie had gone up to Shere Court and Ned was to join herself and Mrs. Craig at the hotel for dinner. He would be going to his own hotel to change first, which meant that Ursula, already in a simple cocktail dress beneath her coat, would have time to herself before returning to the Grand.

Time. Precious time and outward silence in which she might hope to still the clamor in her heart. She bade au revoir to Ned with catching breath, then made her way towards the sea front, meaning to walk out beyond the half mile of promenade to where the cliffs dropped sheer down to the shingle and where the only way was by a winding path above tide-level.

It had been raining for an hour or two, she noted by the sticky treachery of the streets. But that was all to the good. It was fine again now, but the rain had chilled the air, and there would be few people about where she was going. She had to be alone...

Strangely, when, stumbling along the cliff path at last, she allowed herself to think, it was to Denis to whom her thoughts first turned.

How often had she told herself that with Denis she had buried the need and even the ability to love, outliving both the heady delight of knowing that she did love him and, later, the devastating despair that losing him had brought?

Why then, in that moment of self-questioning that she owed to Ned, had she experienced that insisting thrust of knowledge which would not be denied? The

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