The Quiet Heart by Susan Barrie

then you won’t be so shocked at everything I do.”
    “I’m not shocked, I—”
    But Jessamy came creeping in from the corridor, and she looked a trifle mysterious.
    “I’ve been listening outside his door, and he’s not making a sound!” she told them. “I was going to take him a tray of tea if I heard any movements—”
    Alison was shocked again.
    “ You’ll take him a tray of tea? You won’t do anything of the kind,” she ordered Jessamy. “What do you think a man like Charles Leydon would think of a girl like you creeping into his room with a tea-tray while he’s still in bed? For one thing, we don’t even know that he likes early tea, and for another—”
    “He was terribly nice to me last night,” Jessamy recalled reminiscently. There was a kind of glow on her face.
    Alison looked at her. Instead of her usual wool jumper and slacks she was wearing the new dress that Alison herself had bought for her only a week or so before. It was a slim rose-red model with touches of velvet about it, and she had looped a velvet Alice band across the front of her pale forehead and fastened it under her jetty hair at the back. She looked like a rose-red sprite with appealing eyes.
    “I think he’s t-terribly nice, don’t you?” she said, and it was the first time for years she had stuttered.
    Marianne looked amazed.
    “Nice? He treated me last night as if I—as if I was the parlourmaid going out for the evening. I’m not going to find it easy to overlook it, I can tell you!”
    Alison was preparing a tray. It was true Leydon might have fixed ideas about tea in the early morning—not that it was so very early, anyway—and prefer coffee, or even nothing at all, but she couldn’t just enter his room with nothing in her hands. It would be embarrassing enough coming face to face with him in that bleak, cold bedchamber after last night.
    Before she left the kitchen she made certain that Lorne had had some breakfast. But all she had had, apparently, was a bowl of cornflakes. Cornflakes! And this morning the temperature was down several degrees.
    If only she hadn’t overslept!
    Outside Leydon’s door, in the silent corridor, she knocked. But there was no answer. She knocked again, still without result, and then pushed open the door. At first she could see nothing, because the heavy velvet curtains were still dragged across the windows, and there wasn’t a spark of fire on the grate. She set down her tray cautiously on a table just inside the door, and then groped her way across the room to the nearest window. Leydon might resent having a light flashed in his face, and in any case the bedside lamp had been used before he got into bed, and therefore the switch by the door produced no results.
    A pale, cold November sun found its way into the room. It was fighting desperately to dissipate the mist that hung about the tops of the trees outside.
    Alison looked towards the bed. Leydon was not asleep, but he appeared to have lost his voice.
    “Got a bit of a throat,” he croaked.
    Alison instantly forgot that she had no real right to do anything of the kind and felt his forehead, and the bristly sides of his face. They were burning, and she realised that he was in a high fever. His eyes, that she had thought so colourless the day before, were brilliant as diamonds between his thick black eyelashes. They were so bright that they alarmed her, and the fact that he also looked resentful did not affect her at all.
    “This room has felt like an iceberg all night,” he croaked. “I haven’t been warm for a moment. Do you think you could put a hot brick in the bed, or something of the sort?”
    “I’ll bring you a couple of hot-water bottles.”
    “No.” Instantly he sat upright in bed, and she could see that he was wearing sheer silk pyjamas. “I don’t like hot-water bottles. They leak.”
    “These won’t.”
    She didn’t stop to argue, but after hastily pouring him a cup of tea and placing it beside his bed