Things happened so quickly. There was no need for her to open the painful subject with Garth after all because it was he who started it. In the long gloomy corridor with the lights glowing at mid-morning against the swirling, clinging November fog he came to her, his face white with suppressed fury.He said, “Where can we talk, Joan? I’ve got to have a word with you!” And she knew then that he had already learned about the unkind whispering and was already hurt by it beyond her saving. Throwing caution to the winds she pushed open the door of the linen-room.“In here, Garth,” she breathed with a scared look over her shoulder for prowling staff nurses. But there was nobody about to hinder her and in the warm little room with its piles of clean airing sheets and faint smell of iodoform she turned to him.He asked angrily, “Have you heard all this disgusting rubbish about myself and Vera?” He didn’t wait for her answer. He went on, breathless now with indignation. “Simply because I try to put right an old wrong—because I have my own wife and son to live in my home they come about my ears like a nest of hornets!
