‘I hate night duty,’ she muttered.

‘So do I.’

Dulcie glanced at Grace in surprise. It wasn’t like her to complain about anything.

‘I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘The shell shock ward gives me the creeps during the day, I certainly wouldn’t fancy being alone with them after dark. I mean, they’re so deluded they could do anything, couldn’t they? Especially in the dead of night.’ A thought struck her. ‘What if they mistook you for a German spy creeping around their beds in the dark? You could be minding your own business and suddenly—’

‘Don’t!’

The forcefulness with which Grace spoke stopped Dulcie in mid-sentence.

‘I was only joking,’ she said.

‘Well, don’t. I don’t want to hear it.’

Dulcie sent Grace a sidelong look. Her friend’s expression was more troubled than she had ever seen it.

‘Duffield, has something happened?’ she asked.

‘No. No, of course not.’

‘Are you sure? You can tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. Now just shut up about it, all right?’

Grace strode on ahead of her, her cape pulled tightly around her shoulders. Dulcie stared at her in astonishment. She wasn’t sure she had ever heard Grace Duffield raise her voice before.

Fortunately, it looked like being a quiet night on Monaghan ward. Dulcie knew there was plenty she could be getting on with, like making splints and mending worn bed sheets and packing the sterilising drum ready for the morning. But then two of the medical students arrived and so she decided to have a cup of tea in the kitchen with them instead.

‘It’s a pity you can’t come to our party,’ one of them, Henry Davies, said. ‘We’re going to have a riot in the Students’ Union bar.’

‘If it’s anything like last year, I’m sure you are.’ The previous year a few of the students had decided to strip to their underwear and dance in the hospital courtyard on the stroke of midnight. All the nurses had found it hilarious, until Matron appeared in her nightgown and gave them a piece of her mind. Watching her frog-marching the students to the dean’s office, still half naked, was one of the funniest things Dulcie had ever seen.

‘It won’t be the same without you there.’ The other student, James Dillon, gazed at her with soulful brown eyes.

He had already told Dulcie several times that he was in love with her. He was very handsome, and his father owned a munitions factory. But James was barely twenty, far too young for her. Fun to flirt with, Dulcie had decided, but hardly a serious marriage prospect.

‘Perhaps I could come back at midnight, and we could have a party of our own?’ he suggested in a low voice.

Dulcie stared at him. Those deep brown eyes and declarations of undying love did not fool her for a minute. She knew exactly what James Dillon was after.

‘I shall be far too busy,’ she dismissed.

‘Oh, go on. It’ll be fun.’