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usually the very people who lack it.”
    “Touche,” she agreed pleasantly, looking up at his windblown hair, his hard face. “I’ve been poor most of my life, Mr. van der Vere. I’d like to have an expensive dress once in a while, and I have a deep love for luxurious perfume. But I’ve lived very well without those things. The difference is that I live a life of service for God. My pleasure comes from the giving of myself.”
    He looked uncomfortable. “Then why did you give it up to come here?” he asked suspiciously. “I’m sure you’re getting paid much more here than you make working in your hospital,” he added sarcastically.
    She glanced away from him, flushing. “That’s true. But the money wasn’t the reason I came.”
    “Then, what was?”
    She straightened. “Personal reasons, Mr. van der Vere, that have nothing to do with you. Shall we go?”
    “Refusing the challenge?” he prodded. “Very well, lead me back into the house. I wouldn’t want the wind to dislodge your halo.”
    She wanted nothing more at that moment than to
     
    shake him. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything. At least she’d nudged him out of his self-pity, a minor victory. Perhaps there would be others.
    She walked alongside him, feeling oddly elated. She wanted to take the pins out of her long hair and let it blow free. She wanted to take off her sensible white nurse’s shoes and run barefoot along the damp beach, like a child enjoying nature’s beauty. Her eyes lifted to the somber man at her side. She was beginning to see a purpose in her presence there; it went much deeper than the nursing of a blind man.

Chapter Four
    The next weeks were trying. Gannon van der Vere seemed to go out of his way to find fault with Dana. Nothing she did pleased him, and all the ground she seemed to have gained in the first few days abruptly slid back into the sea.
    He sat behind his desk and stayed on the phone almost constantly. He refused to go out of the room except to sleep. He was irritable and unapproachable, and when Dana tried to talk to him, he found an excuse not to listen. The doctor’s visit only irritated him further, and after his examination he retreated into his bedroom and wouldn’t even come out to eat.
    “Dr. Shane just restated his own opinion to Gannon.” Lorraine sighed wearily as she and Dana sat down to supper by themselves. “It made him furious, of course. He won’t accept that the condition isn’t due to something surgically correctible.”
    “He’s a stubborn man,” Dana commented.
    “Worse than stubborn. Just like his late father.” She smiled.”He was quite a man, my husband. A little mellower than Gannon, but of course he was older.”
     
    51
    Diana Palmer
    “Perhaps he’ll come to admit it eventually,” Dana suggested. “In the meanwhile, having people around would help him tremendously. Doesn’t he have friends?”
    “He had plenty of them, when he could see,” his stepmother said angrily. “And girl friends by the score. People who loved for him to spend money on them. Now…” She shrugged her delicate shoulders. “This place is like the end of the earth for that kind of person, Dana. They don’t like peace and solitude. They like bright lights and activity and, frankly, drugs and alcohol.”
    “Did he?” she asked, because she wanted to know.
    “Gannon?” she laughed. “No, he was never the type to need crutches of any kind. His late wife was the party-goer. Of course, I don’t think she indulged. But all their friends do.”
    “No children?”
    “They didn’t want children,” Lorraine said with a sigh. “Their lives were so full, you see.”
    Full. Dana doubted that, somehow, but she was too polite to state her convictions. She was getting a vivid picture of Gannon’s life before the blindness, and it was an unpleasant one. She felt sorrier for him than ever.
    Dana especially loved the beach at night, and when she could sneak away for a few minutes, she liked to