The first basket went, by Johnny's request, to Sidney Page.
"I want her to have it," he said. "She got corns on her fingers from
rubbing me when I came in first; and, besides--"
"Yes?" said K. He was tying a most complicated knot, and could not look
up.
"I know something," said Johnny. "I'm not going to get in wrong by talking,
but I know something. You give her the basket."
K. looked up then, and surprised Johnny's secret in his face.
"Ah!" he said.
"If I'd squealed she'd have finished me for good. They've got me, you
know. I'm not running in 2.40 these days."
"I'll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?"
Johnny looked around. The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon.
The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, was snoring heavily.
"It was the dark-eyed one that changed the medicine on me," he said. "The
one with the heels that were always tapping around, waking me up. She did
it; I saw her."
After all, it was only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of
impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what
would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her
before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of
their paths crossing again troubled him.
Carlotta Harrison was well again, and back on duty. Luckily for Sidney,
her three months' service in the operating-room kept them apart. For
Carlotta was now not merely jealous. She found herself neglected, ignored.
It ate her like a fever.
But she did not yet suspect an engagement. It had been her theory that
Wilson would not marry easily--that, in a sense, he would have to be
coerced into marriage. Some clever woman would marry him some day, and no
one would be more astonished than himself. She thought merely that Sidney
was playing a game like her own, with different weapons. So she planned
her battle, ignorant that she had lost already.
Her method was simple enough. She stopped sulking, met Max with smiles,
made no overtures toward a renewal of their relations. At first this
annoyed him. Later it piqued him. To desert a woman was justifiable,
under certain circumstances. But to desert a woman, and have her
apparently not even know it, was against the rules of the game.
During a surgical dressing in a private room, one day, he allowed his
fingers to touch hers, as on that day a year before when she had taken Miss
Simpson's place in his office. He was rewarded by the same slow,
smouldering glance that had caught his attention before. So she was only
acting indifference!