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It was noon before all were dealt with and they could wash at the enamel bowl for the last time before lunch.

Wiping his hands, Dr. Grenfell said: “And now it is my duty to prescribe for you, young lady. Have a cool bath and a rest before you eat. You’ve been extraordinarily helpful this morning.”

“I'm a queasy probationer,” she replied ruefully.

He smiled in his distant, perfunctory manner, then looked at her more closely. “Probationer? Is that how you regard yourself? Could you settle here and take part in the work?”

“I’d like to, for a time, but I’d have to be quite free to leave whenever I chose, or to go away and come back again.”

“Naturally. You are nineteen?”

“Nearly.”

“Very young. We cannot bind you, badly though Nurse Briggs requires help. Unfortunately, we have neither time nor facilities for training you properly, but there is a centre up the Coast where you can live and receive training, and earn a small salary besides. You are accustomed to the tropics, and I think you’d be happy there. If, on the other hand, you would prefer to remain here as general nursing assistant, we should be exceedingly grateful for your services.”

Unattracted by either alternative, Phil thanked him politely.

“It is a serious step,” he said. “Think it over long and well.” Again that fleeting smile. “We will agree not to mention it for a further month. To the bath, Miss Crane, and an hour between your cool white sheets!”

Phil had no illusions about her own capacity for attending the sick. As Nurse Briggs stated one morning, after a child’s bums had been dressed: “You’ll never make a go of it if you keep on wincing at the sight of a wound, and tensing yourself when a child cries. If you can’t forget the patient’s pain, my dear, you’ll be limp as a rag in no time.”

True enough. Phil did end each day sapped of strength and the will to live, but it was a condition in which sleep came fairly easily, and for that benefit alone it was to be courted.

The moment the light was out, of course, she became wide awake and wallowed in a chasm of bewilderment and distress. Something would dart out from the prison of her mind—the mother she despised and could not recall; Nigel’s antipathy to women; Clin Dakers with his hands on her throat—and she would turn into her pillow knowing it was Julian who prodded such memories into activity. Once she had admitted Julian she fell asleep.

EARLY one evening while Phil was bathing one of the native babies on the veranda, a shadow slanted across the table. Phil paled; her fingers curled over the edge of the table. “Hello, Julian. We weren’t expecting you.”

She called a native helper and instructed her to wrap the child and take her to her mother. Julian waited, frowning. “You shouldn’t be working yet,” he said tersely.

“Surely you wouldn’t want me to be idle while Nurse Briggs has so much to do?” she said chidingly, as they moved along to her balcony. “Women are doing that sort of thing in all the hot countries of the world.”

“I don’t care,” he bit out. “You’re not to do it.”

Wisely, she refrained from retort. In the balcony she indicated a chair. "I'll wash my hands and get you a drink.”

“I’d prefer coffee,” he said.

With a nod she went into her room. She lit the spirit stove and set the tiny tin saucepan to boil, washed and used a dab of powder. On a native basketwork tray she set two cups and saucers and a box of Scotch shortbread given her by Matt. The consuming ache to see Julian again had failed to culminate in delight at his nearness. Was his curtness merely the outcome of transient displeasure at the task in which he had surprised her? She would soon know.

She opened the door and he took the tray from her.

“Matt told me you were fit,” he said. “No pains anywhere?”

Phil smiled. “Nothing pathological. Black or white coffee?”

She led him to talk about the plantation, and heard that the new overseer was consistently intelligent and conscientious, and the drug menace had fizzled out for a while. Julian had discovered that Astartes had sent down the load which caused the riot, and he had complained to the Portuguese authorities.

“A couple of officials came to take statements and I laid before them a bundle of facts. Rodrigo was cordially invited to attend a conference, and it goes without saying, he blandly denied all knowledge of the affair. He finished up tight as a tick, vowing that he loved me as a blood-brother.” He grinned. “Somehow we both got our own way, so there should be peace for a period.”

“It must be wonderful to taste conquest as often as you do.”

He glanced at her sharply. “Everything you’ve gone through has been of your own choosing. No woman could live on Valeira for two years without being scarred, but at your age there’s a chance of the scars fading.” He leaned across the grass table. “Look here, Phil, this has to end. I’m on a week’s holiday. I’ll take you to Lagos and put you on a liner, and you can leave the dissolution of that bogus ceremony in my hands.”

The sight of his brown paw alongside her own small fist roused in her a curious violence.

“It’s in your hands,” she cried. “Go ahead with it, but don’t expect to ship me around as though I were a sack of meal. I’m sick of your insensitiveness. . . .”

Simultaneously they were on their feet.

“Shut up,” he said. “The whole place will hear you.”

“Let them, then they’ll all know you for an overbearing brute.” She was backing towards her bedroom door. “You may be king of the plantation, but here you’re superfluous.

“Stop it, will you!” he said savagely. “The minute we get together sparks fly and you’re the one who starts them. Doesn’t that show how your nerves are cracking?”

“My nerves were sound enough till you got to work on them,” she choked. “Go for your holiday, Julian. Find a woman in Lagos and laugh with her about the kid down in Goanda who fancies herself in love with you. . . .”

He was staring down at her with intensity. She gave a gasp of fright.

“Oh, no, no!” she muttered, and turned into the bedroom, thudding the door behind her.

When the doctor’s houseboy knocked she ordered him away. He came back and she had to answer.

“You come to dinner, please, missus?”

“Not tonight,” she jerked. “Tell the doctor I’m sorry, I have a headache.”

Later Nurse Briggs appeared, bringing diluted tinned milk and some biscuits.

“Head no better, dear? I get them too . . . beasts. The doctor wondered if you’d been overdoing it, and Mr. Caswell said he thought you had.”

“He’s still here ... Mr. Caswell?”

“Why, yes. He’s staying till the end of the week.”

It couldn’t happen. Julian was joking, or testing her, or . . . her bones froze. Had he been aware all along that she loved him? Had he been warding off, with all the hardness in his nature, such a confession as she had made this evening?

“Where is he going to sleep?” she asked.

“At the Government rest-house, the other side of the village. I took you there once. Remember?”

Yes, Phil remembered. A square, one-room dwelling containing a few unimaginative pieces of Government furniture. The district officer slept there about three times a year, and by official order the place was always kept clean and aired.

Nurse Briggs said, “Think you’ll sleep all right, or shall I beg a couple of tablets from the doctor?”

“Thanks so much, but. . . no.”

“That’s sensible of you. It’s best to do without them if you can. Good night, my dear.”

Phil was alone with her horror . . . and a gladness that she was not yet called upon to face the end.

Next morning she breakfasted as usual on the coffee and toast brought by the boy. She made her bed, tidied the room, and strode smartly along to the hospital entrance, sparing no glance for the house, and carried on with her round of the cots. About ten-thirty Nurse Briggs called her out to the veranda for a cup of tea. They chatted about the patients till the nurse had to go off and assist the doctor in the operating-room.

Phil walked along the veranda to her balcony ... to find Julian sitting there.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly. “I saw you threading in this direction and thought I’d get here first. You’re looking blooming, considering the sleepless night.”

Momentarily startled, her lips parted to speak and then she met the quizzical light in his eyes, and her mouth compressed.

“I strolled about most of the dark hours myself,” he admitted drily. “Come and sit down.”

“I always change my shoes mid-morning,” she said stiffly.

“Relax, and I’ll fetch them for you.”

Phil had no intention of continuing the scene begun yesterday. She remained outside on the path in the shade of a tree, and sat on the balcony wall to unlace the ward shoes lent her by Nurse Briggs. She let Julian draw them off and strap on her sandals because it was less trouble than arguing, but immediately he straightened she did so too.

“What about a trip up-river?” he said.

“No, thank you. I’ve work to do.”

“You’re let off while I’m here. I daresay we could rake up a picnic.”

“No, thank you,” she repeated.

“Afraid?” he jeered softly.

“No,” she lied lightly. “I don’t care to take a canoe ride with a strange man. If you felt normal you wouldn’t invite me.

He smiled. “You’re less cute than I thought. You can’t see that by sending away the freighter this morning so that I’ve no alternative but to haunt Goanda for five or six days, I’m laying myself wide open.”

“Not to me,” she said huskily. “It was unkind of you to stay, Julian . . . horribly unkind.”

“You left me no choice,” he said shortly, adding with sarcasm: “You won’t accuse me of neglect if I go for a cruise on my own? Unadulterated Goanda might curdle my brain.”

Julian’s presence at Goanda had a reverse effect to the one he had anticipated. Phil worked more desperately and passed the leisure hours alone in her room. She met him only at dinner or in front of an interested, dark-skinned audience. His moods, by turns both grim and taunting, were painful and puzzling; when his company was unavoidable she closed up, and got through with a conventional smile and platitudes.

The first three days he cleared off in a boat after a quick lunch, returning in time for a bath before dinner. The fourth day, while eating meal biscuit spread thinly with tinned butter, Phil tiptoed at her window to watch his preparations on the river bank. He was seated on a canvas chair about two hundred yards away, cleaning his rifle.

In a wave of sweat and dread, Phil recollected that in two more days she would be denied even the agonizing pleasure of surreptitious peeping. She dropped the unfinished biscuit on to a plate and dipped her face into a bowl of tepid water.

When she came out into the furnace blast Julian was gone, and so was the boat. How could he bear to travel the channel of the river in this lethal heat? It was worse than she had ever known on Valeira.

Dr. Grenfell, his silver head helmeted for the brief space between his house and the dispensary, called to her to follow him.

“You are distressed by this heat, Miss Crane?” he enquired when they were inside.

“It’s certainly fierce,” she said.

“So fierce that Nurse Briggs has had to lie down. I must dispense some medicines before the storm. Will you help?”

“Of course. The sky is clear. What makes you think there’ll be a storm, Dr. Grenfell?”

“This stillness is the warning. Soon the sky will haze and a wind get up. Here, one sees no ominous accumulation of clouds, but they are there, beyond the trees. We’ll waste no time. Some four-ounce and eight-ounce bottles, please.”

A hospital boy carried the medicines to the nurse’s office, and Phil emerged into the oven-hot veranda. The beds were being pushed back into the wards, and the storm shutters closed. The yard was deserted.

Subtly, the sky was changing, the steel-blue filming with a copper haze. From this distance the river was black glass, the tight-packed trees on the opposite bank cruelly inhospitable. Dr. Grenfell had said the river narrowed and became more macabre as it twined inland. Julian could take care of himself—none better—but it was unsettling to think of him in a frail canoe on deep, squall-tossed waters. Maybe he had seen this storm approaching and turned back.

She went to the house and questioned the boy who squatted on the step. “Have you seen the white master from the island?”

“No, missus. Missus Brick she sleep. I sit here.”

From which Phil supposed that his instructions were to prevent noise within the house while Nurse Briggs slept. Damn Julian. She hoped he’d get drenched and catch the snuffles; only a cold, not a chill. Sneezes and the miseries; enough to keep him off the river for the remainder of the week.

A sudden wind roared in from the treetops. Branches threshed, and the corrugated iron roofs of the small buildings creaked in preliminary protest. And now the thunder, full-throated and deceptively wooing; and horizontal shafts of flame that hurt the eyes. A dark pall was moving in, and large round drops smacked on her face and arms, but she could not bear to imprison herself in her room. The house would be more bearable.

Nurse Briggs, a tired greeting in her gesture, was sitting in the lounge. Phil declined tea, and paced from window to window, eyeing those huge single lumps of rain, her nerves a-quiver.

“Julian will be caught up the river,” she said at last. “This is going to be a hefty storm.”

“He’ll have seen it brewing. He may beat the rain.”

“He’s stubborn enough to stay out in it.”

“We ought to send a boy along with a fresh bath towel.”

“I’ll do it.”

Grasping the excuse, she ran to the linen cupboard and dragged out a bath-sheet. Poking her head into the lounge, she said: “The boy seems to be missing. I’ll take it over,” and was out of the front door before the woman had time to raise an eyebrow.

The Government house was set exclusively at the end of the village, like a headman’s. Beside it leaned a rotting flag-pole. Phil paused at the door, and after a minute she went in, blinking till her pupils adjusted themselves to the dimness.