Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN

felt for him, but he just could not find the words, and so instead he nodded and stumbled out of the hospital into the cold of the pre-dawn summer morning.

      They would not wake Lucy until nine, they told him kindly. That would give him time to have a brief rest and get back to be with her.

      It was not his fault, nor the hospital’s, that Lucy did not need to be wakened.

      She waited until the nurses changed shift. There was a new nurse, a trainee, the ward was busy, and it was easy for Lucy to convince the girl that she could manage to get to the bathroom unaided.

      It took her a long time to make her way to the prem unit. She was still very weak. They hadn’t told her just how much blood she had lost or just how much danger she had actually been in, and Lucy assumed that it was the drug they had given her that made her feel so unsteady.

      The nurse in charge of the unit didn’t see her until it was too late. The tubes had been removed from the incubator and Nicholas had been dressed in a set of minute doll’s clothes, a white knitted romper suit embroidered with teddy bears in pale blue and yellow.

      The mother of another premature baby had given the clothes to the hospital, and the nurse, who knew that she should have the strength to detach herself from her emotions, had cried a little as she dressed him in them.

      She saw Lucy and knew immediately that there was no need to tell her anything, and she marvelled, not for the first time, at the power of maternal love. Silently she settled Lucy with Nicholas in her arms and then went to her office to ring Lucy’s ward.

      His body felt soft and warm so that it was almost possible for Lucy to believe that he was simply asleep. She touched his face. His skin felt so soft. He looked like Giles. She was sure of it. It was only when she kissed him that her control broke, her body racked by the shudders of pain that ached through her.

      By the time Giles arrived they had sedated her, and, what with his concern over her and the arrangements for the funeral she insisted on holding, it never occurred to Giles to tell her how he had watched over Nicholas for her, or that he had been with him when he died.