he kitchen for my tray
to be filled with little castles of lemon jelly, the hot blast from the
kitchen drawing stray wisps of hair from beneath my cap, I saw the
familiar limping figure--a figure bound up with my first days at the
hospital, evoking a hundred evenings at the concerts, in the
dining-room. I felt he had been away, but I didn't dare risk a "So
you're back!"

He smiled, blushed, and limped past me.

Upstairs in the ward, as I was serving out my jellies, he arrived in the
doorway, but, avoiding me, hobbled round the ward, visiting every bed
but the one I was at at the moment. Then he went downstairs again.

I passed him on the stairs. He can't say he didn't have his opportunity,
for I even stopped with my heavy tray and spoke to him.

Half an hour later he was back in the ward again (not his ward), and
this time he found the courage of hysteria. There in the middle of the
ward, under the glaring Christmas lights, with the eyes of every
interested man in every bed glued upon us, he presented me with a fan
wrapped in white paper: "A little present I bought you, nurse." I took
it, eyes sizzling and burning holes in my shoulders, and stammered my
frantic thanks.

"You do like it, nurse?" he said rapidly, three times in succession.

And I: "I do, I do, I do...."

"I thought you would. You do like it?"

"Oh, just what I wanted!"

"That's all right, then. Just a little Christmas present."

We couldn't stop. It was like taking too much butter for the marmalade
and too much marmalade for the butter.

He leaves the hospital in a day or two.

The fog is still thick. To-night at the station after a day off I found
it white and silent. Touching the arm of a man, I asked him the
all-important question: "Are the buses running?"

"Oh no...."

And the cabs all gone home to bed, and I was hungry!

What ghosts pass ... and voices, bodyless, talking intimately while
their feet fall without a stir on the grass of the open Heath.

I was excited by the strange silent fog.

But my left shoe began to hurt me, and stopping at the house of a girl I
knew, I borrowed a country pair of hers: no taller than I, she takes two
sizes larger; they were like boats.

I started to trudge the three miles home in the boats: the slightest
flick of the foot would have sent one of them flying beyond the eye of
God or man. After a couple of miles the shoes began to tell, and I stood
still and lifted up one foot behind me, craning