“By all means. Who is he, Lieutenant?”
“A Mr. Thomas Hollander—lives on East Fifty-second Street.”
“Never heard of him; but there’s no reason why I should have.” He sped a parting look toward Endicott, faintly breathing on the bed. “The most reticent man, Lieutenant, whom I have ever met.”
They went outside and closed the door.
Nurse Murrow went over and locked it. She felt, to put it mildly, not a little atwitter. Her life had not conformed to the popular version of a trained nurse’s. There had been no romantic patients in it whose pallid, interesting brows she had smoothly divorced from fever by a gentle pass or two with magnetic fingers. No grateful millionaire had offered her his heart and name; nor had any motherly eyed old dowager died and willed her a fortune. No. There had been, on the other hand, a good many years of sloppy, disillusioning, grilling work, long hours spent in pampering peevish patients, patients who were ugly with that special ugliness which is inherent in the sick, snappish doctors, and a perfect desert of romance.
The present case loomed as a heaven-sent oasis. Who knew what might not develop out of it? It awakened all the atrophied hunger of her starved sentimentalism. And even if nothing did result from it—nothing practical, like marriage, or a good bonus—it would at least leave her something to think about during those endless, tiresome, tiring hours of the future. …
She crossed to the bed and looked down at Endicott. She felt his pulse and made a notation on her night chart. She lingered near the bathroom doorway.
“The strangest case,” she whispered, “that I’ve ever been on.”
Cassidy looked up at her bleakly.