Green for Danger Read Online Free

very good-looking, but radiant with the charm of absolute integrity; sensitive, modest, rather shy, honest to an almost painful degree. He, too, was glad to go into the Army. “That Evans girl,” he said; “the one who died under the anæsthetic last week—I’ve had an anonymous letter about her to-day. I think it’s a good thing I’m getting out of the practice for a bit; I shall be Brave Lieutenant Barnes, serving his King and Country, and by the time the war’s ended the whole thing will have blown over.”
    â€œBut, my dear boy, the death was no earthly fault of yours.”
    â€œWell, we know that now,” said Barnes, shrugging his shoulders, “but I couldn’t account for it at the time. I got it into my head that I’d seen the tubes crossed during the operation—the oxygen and the nitrous oxide, you know; it must have been my imagination, but I was worrying about what could have gone wrong, and I kept getting a sort of vision of the two tubes crossing instead of being separate. I went into the theatre and asked them to check up; everything had been put away by then, of course, but nobody had noticed anything wrong … only the staff are mostly local people and my asking must have put ideas into their heads, and I suppose they talked. The mother came to me after the inquest and accused me of murdering the girl. It was—oh, it was horrible! Of course they decided that the findings at the inquest had been cooked, to protect me. She said they would get up a round robin or something or other, and hound me out of the town. They could too, you know; that kind of mud sticks in a one-horse place like Heronsford. It’s fortunate for me, really, that the war’s come when it has, if it had to come; my father can carry on the practice while I’m in the Army, and by the time it’s all over the affair will have fizzled out.”
    â€œThe panel patient is a strange animile,” said Moon, pacing along beside him thoughtfully. “When you think of all that you’ve done for this town, you and your father, Barnes.…”
    â€œI wonder if T. Atkins is going to be so very much different,” said Barney pessimistically.
    Two more letters; both from women. One very neat and correct, a pretty round hand, a pretty grey-blue notepaper, the stamp stuck neatly in the corner; the other on a cheap, white envelope, addressed to the Matron, the Sisters’ Mess—the handwriting sputtering across the paper, uncertain and ill at ease. V.A.D. Frederica Linley, and Sister Bates of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, reporting to Heron’s Park Military Hospital.…
    Frederica’s father who for thirty years had been a legend in some outpost of Empire, had subsequently settled down in Dinard, where he could by no means be got to appreciate that the inhabitants had not only never heard of the legend, but had never even heard of the Outpost. The war put an end to this embarrassing state of affairs and, on a nightmare voyage to England, he met and affianced himself to a wealthy widow with a proper respect for the pioneers of the East. Frederica received the news with her habitual calm. “I think she’s too frightful, Daddy,” she said, “but it’s you that’s got to sleep with her, not me,” and she absented herself from the new home upon a series of lectures, and finally wrote off to Heron’s Park that she would be arriving for duty on such-and-such a day, as instructed. Since a blowsy trollop of fifty cannot be expected to care for competition from an exquisite, self-possessed little creature of twenty-two, the ex-widow was not sorry to see her go.
    The reaction of Sister Bates to her transition from civilian to military nursing, was simple and forthright. She thought: “Perhaps I shall meet some nice officers!” and lest anyone be tempted to despise such single-minded devotion