The Little Doctor by Jean S. Macleod Page A

about the stairs, though.”
    “Well, don’t tell Max what you think,” Valerie smiled, pleasantly dismissing the subject. “He’d quote you against me.”
    “That would be ridiculous,” Jane said without thinking. “My opinion wouldn’t matter in the least.”
    “No,” Valerie mused, “perhaps not, as you say.”
    She turned toward the stairs.
    “Come and have a wash,” she invited. “We’ve got an hour before the others arrive.”
    The stairs were shallow and easy to climb. The effect from the top, where there was a wrought-iron balustrade along the length of the landing, gave the impression of looking down into the hall from a minstrels’ gallery. The house was too new, however, for it to be any more than a copy of the original idea, but it gave the entrance hall character and grace.
    Valerie flung open a bedroom door.
    “I’ll put you in here,” she decided. “My own room is in chaos at the moment. I’ve had it altered and Agnes hasn’t got me properly settled in yet. My clothes are all over the place. Please say if there’s anything else you want,” she added on an odd little note of friendliness. “I’ll get it for you.”
    “There couldn’t possibly be anything,” Jane said, surveying the elegant room and the bathroom leading from it. “But I’m rather in a dither about my working clothes. I really ought not to have come.
    “Don’t worry about that,” Valerie assured her. “Nobody dresses elaborately up here, not on this sort of invitation. I just rang some people and asked them to come to meet you. Eddie Jakes will probably put in an appearance in tweeds. He’d come in riding - breeches, I suppose, if he could get away with it. He’s Jim Crow’s ‘owner’, by the way.”
    Jane looked her surprise.
    “Eddie owns the horses and Jim trains them for him,” Valerie explained, backing toward the door. “Max doesn’t entirely approve of Eddie, by the way,” she added.
    Why, then, invite him to dinner? Sternly Jane reminded herself that it was no affair of hers.
    Yet, somehow, as she washed in the elegant bathroom with its black glass walls stretching up to a high yellow ceiling, she could not quite convince herself that Maxwell Kilsyth’s ultimate happiness was of no concern to her. She wanted him to be happy and he needed a wife to walk hand-in-hand with him, to serve the practice, to be loyal and conscientious and true in all things. In other words, he needed a partner.
    Going slowly down the staircase after Valerie had called her to come down when she was ready, she met Max in the hall.
    He had come in at the open front door as she reached the final curve in the stairs and he stood looking up at her as if he had seen a ghost.
    “Jane—of course!” he said, at last. “I should have remembered.” He had forgotten that she was coming. It was of little real importance to him. That was what he had been trying to say.
    She bit back a little sound that was like a sob and smiled into his tired eyes. How weary he looked, strained and drawn about the mouth and warily conscious of each movement in the quiet house.
    “Valerie asked me to come,” Jane found herself explaining for no very clear reason, “but if you’re tired, Max, after a heavy surgery—”
    He shrugged the suggestion aside.
    “The surgery was nothing. Merely routine work.” He smiled briefly. “It would have been much busier if you hadn’t been in the village with the caravan,” he assured her. “ I should have had all these immunizations to cope with on top of my other work.”
    “You haven’t an assistant?”
    His face stiffened.
    “No,” he said.
    That was all. No explanation, no reason offered as to why so large and scattered a practice would not support two doctors.
    “ We’ll have a drink, shall we?” he suggested. “Or would you rather see the gardens while there’s still enough light?” Conventional, correct, leaving all the past behind, Jane thought. Oh, well, perhaps that was the easiest