RAFFERTY SETTLED THE Hospital Administrator as comfortably as the rickety chairs would allow. He was surprised by a feeling of recognition. He felt he had met her before somewhere and then it came to him. Big-boned and with the rather old-fashioned bun hairstyle and practical short nails, she reminded Rafferty of one of his former school teachers, a Miss Robinson, who had fallen in love late in life, with the new French master. She had been an intense woman and had fallen hard, and he remembered with a trace of shame how he and the rest of the school had sniggered over the affair, how they had mimicked the adoring eyes of Miss Robinson at assembly. She must, like Miss Parry, have been in her early forties: "Miss Robinson's last chance", the affair had been dubbed. The man had let her down,
