“He said what the hell did that matter? And then he was awful. He turned on me. He said, ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? I suppose you can do your durnedest to help another woman?’ And he went on at me—said I’d talked as though I was interested in doctoring and had said I wished I was a nurse. ‘All pretty talk, I suppose! You didn’t mean anything real by it, but this is real and you’re going to behave like a decent human being and not like a useless ornamental nitwit!’

“I’ve done the most incredible things, Jerry. Held instruments and boiled them and handed things. I’m so tired I can hardly stand up. It was dreadful. But he saved her—and the baby. It was born alive. He didn’t think at one time he could save it. Oh dear!”

Joanna covered her face with her hands.

I contemplated her with a certain amount of pleasure and mentally took my hat off to Owen Griffith. He’d brought Joanna slap up against reality for once.

I said, “There’s a letter for you in the hall. From Paul, I think.”

“Eh?” She paused for a minute and then said, “I’d no idea, Jerry, what doctors had to do. The nerve they’ve got to have!”

I went out into the hall and brought Joanna her letter. She opened it, glanced vaguely at its contents, and let it drop.

“He was—really—rather wonderful. The way he fought—the way he wouldn’t be beaten! He was rude and horrible to me—but he was wonderful.”

I observed Paul’s disregarded letter with some pleasure. Plainly, Joanna was cured of Paul.

Chapter Thirteen

Thirteen

I

Things never come when they are expected.

I was full of Joanna’s and my personal affairs and was quite taken aback the next morning when Nash’s voice said over the telephone: “We’ve got her, Mr. Burton!”

I was so startled I nearly dropped the receiver.

“You mean the—”

He interrupted.

“Can you be overheard where you are?”

“No, I don’t think so—well, perhaps—”

It seemed to me that the baize door to the kitchen had swung open a trifle.

“Perhaps you’d care to come down to the station?”

“I will. Right away.”

I was at the police station in next to no time. In an inner room Nash and Sergeant Parkins were together. Nash was wreathed in smiles.

“It’s been a long chase,” he said. “But we’re there at last.”

He flicked a letter across the table. This time it was all typewritten. It was, of its kind, fairly mild.