She went away, sped on her way by a blushing Amazon, and Grant did not remember anything about woolly lambs until the woolly lamb actually turned up in his room next evening. The woolly lamb was wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, which in some odd way emphasised the resemblance instead of detracting from it. Grant had been dozing, more at peace with the world than he had been for some time; history was, as Matron had pointed out, an excellent way of acquiring a sense of perspective. The tap at his door was so tentative that he had decided that he had imagined it. Taps on hospital doors are not apt to be tentative. But something made him say: ‘Come in!’ and there in the opening was something that was so unmistakably Marta’s woolly lamb that Grant laughed aloud before he could stop himself.
The young man looked abashed, smiled nervously, propped the spectacles on his nose with a long thin forefinger, cleared his throat, and said:
‘Mr Grant? My name is Carradine. Brent Carradine. I hope I haven’t disturbed you when you were resting.’
‘No, no. Come in, Mr Carradine. I am delighted to see you.’
‘Marta—Miss Hallard, that is—sent me. She said I could be of some help to you.’
‘Did she say how? Do sit down. You’ll find a chair over there behind the door. Bring it over.’
He was a tall boy, hatless, with soft fair curls crowning a high forehead and a much too big tweed coat hanging unfastened round him in negligent folds, American-wise. Indeed, it was obvious that he was in fact American. He brought over the chair, planted himself on it with the coat spread round him like some royal robe and looked at Grant with kind brown eyes whose luminous charm not even the horn-rims could dim.
— Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time