The Essential Writings of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes

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СКАЧАТЬ had fallen out as such pleasant meetings sometimes do fall out, very naturally and innocently, just a week ago to-day.

      Katty, on her way from the south to stay with her friends, the Haworths, had run up against Godfrey Pavely at King's Cross. That had been a really extraordinary coincidence, and one of which it would have been foolish not to take advantage. For it turned out that he also was going to Yorkshire, and on the business in which they were both interested, to spend a night with the ex-money-lender, Greville Howard. That gentleman, it seemed, was making certain difficulties about the matter—he wanted to stay his hand till he had seen the French bankers who were concerned with the affair. As he spent each spring in the south of France, that would not be such a difficulty as it seemed. Still, it was a bore, and the other had felt he had better go and see him.

      After a pleasant journey together, as they were steaming into York station Godfrey suddenly asked: "Must you go on to your friends at once? Couldn't you telephone to them to meet you by a later train? I'm in no hurry." And, smilingly, she had consented.

      Of late Katty's heart had become very soft to her old friend. For one thing he was being so good to her in the matter of money. That two hundred pounds he had given to her some weeks ago had been followed by two fifty-pound notes. And yet, though she knew poor Godfrey was quite unaware of it, her original purpose—the purpose which had so distressed him, and which, as she well knew, had induced in him such extraordinary and unusual generosity—had not faltered at all. Katty still meant to cut the cable, and start a new life elsewhere.

      Rosedean was all very well; her close friendship with Godfrey Pavely was all very well; though of late she had been disagreeably aware that Godfrey was ashamed—ashamed of giving her that money, ashamed of his increasing fondness for her, ashamed also of—well, of other little things which sometimes happened, things which Katty thought quite unimportant, which she regarded as part of the payment due from her to Godfrey. But she realised more rather than less, as time went on, that if she wanted to make anything of her life there must come a change. She would wait a while, wait perhaps till next autumn—so she had told those kind friends of hers, the Haworths.

      Katty was sometimes surprised to find how sorry she was that things had not fallen out otherwise. But she had always tried, in all the great things of life, to look the truth squarely in the face. Only once had she been caught doing anything else—and that, as we know, had been years and years ago. She was not likely to make that sort of mistake now. She had come to see, with a rather painful clearness, that Godfrey and Laura, however ill they got on together, were not the sort of people to lend themselves to any kind of juggling with the law to obtain their liberty.

      But she had been disappointed in Oliver Tropenell. She had felt in him accumulated forces of that explosive energy which leads to determined action—also she had thought that Gillie would do something.

      But the two had disappeared together almost immediately after her talk with Laura's brother. That was over ten weeks ago now, and neither had given any sign of life since.

      But Katty intended to keep up with Godfrey. For one thing she was keenly interested in that business in which they were, in a sense, both engaged. Also one never can tell what life—and death—may not bring forth. Whatever happened, the link between herself and Godfrey was too strong ever to be broken. Even if she married again, which she supposed she would do some time or other, there seemed no reason, to her, at any rate, why she should not keep up with Godfrey. He was her trustee now, as well as her oldest friend.

      So it was that she had very willingly assented to do him the trifling favour of spending some further hours in his company.

      As they wandered about the old city, and lingered awhile in the great Minster, neither of them said a word that the whole world might not have overheard. They visited some of the curiosity shops for which York is famed, and Katty's companion, with that new generosity which sat on him so strangely, bought a beautiful, and very costly, old cut-glass pendant for Rosedean.

      They did not meet a soul that either of them knew, excepting, yes, stop——After they had said goodbye (Godfrey, with a rather shocked look on his face, for Katty, imprudent, foolish Katty, had woman-like seemed to expect that he would kiss her in a corner of an empty waiting-room where at any moment they might have been surprised by some acquaintance of one or the other of them!)—after, as arranged, they had said good-bye, and Katty was engaged in taking her ticket for the branch line station for which she was bound, a curious thing happened.

      She suddenly heard a voice, a man's voice, which sounded pleasantly familiar.

      Who could it be? The association evoked was wholly agreeable, but Katty could not place, in the chambers of her memory, the owner of the rather peculiar accents which were engaged in asking when the next train back to London would start.

      She had turned round quickly, only to see a small queue of people behind her, among them surely the owner of that peculiar voice. But no, she did not know any one there—though among them a man attracted her attention, for the simple reason that he was staring at her very hard. He was obviously a foreigner, for his skin was olive-tinted, and he had a small, black, pointed beard. He stared at Katty with an air of rather insolent admiration. And then he broke away from the queue, and walked quickly off, out of the booking-office.

      Katty always enjoyed admiration, whatever its source, and yet a queer kind of shiver had gone through her when this impertinent stranger's glance rested full on her face. She had had the odious sensation that the man saw something to be jeered at, as well as admired, in her neat and attractive self.

      At last, reluctantly, Katty got up and went into her well-warmed comfortable bathroom. It was nice to be home again, at no one's orders but her own. After she had dressed, she rang, and very soon came her breakfast, daintily served by the devoted Harber, also the one daily paper she felt she could afford to take.

      Katty was one of the many women to whom the daily picture-paper supplied a long-felt, if unconscious, want. It gave her just the amount of news, and the kind of news, that her busy mind, absorbed in other things, could assimilate comfortably. She was no reader, though sometimes she would manage to gallop through some book that all the world was talking about. But newspapers had always bored her. Still, she had become very fond of the paper she now held in her hand. It only cost a halfpenny a day, and Katty liked small, sensible economies.

      That liking of hers was one of the links which bound her to Godfrey Pavely, but unlike Godfrey, Katty did not care for money for money's sake. She only liked money for what money could buy. And sometimes, when she was in a cheerful, mischievous mood, she would tell herself, with a smile, that if ever her Castle in Spain turned out to have been built on a solid foundation—if ever, that is, she became Godfrey Pavely's wife, she would know how to spend the money he had garnered so carefully. She felt pretty sure, deep in her heart, that should such an unlikely thing come to pass, she would know how to "manage" Godfrey, and that, if surprised, he would not really mind what she did. She always got good value out of everything she acquired, and that would remain true if, instead of spending pence, she was ever able to spend pounds.

      A little before eleven, just as Katty was beginning to think it was time for her to finish dressing, she heard the gate of her domain open, and the voice of little Alice Pavely rise up through the still, frosty air, mingling with the deeper, gentler tones of Laura.

      It was an odd thing, considering that the two women were at any rate in theory intimate friends, that Laura very, very seldom came to Rosedean. In fact Katty could not remember a single time when Laura had come in the morning, an uninvited, unexpected guest. So suddenly poor Katty felt a little chill of apprehension; she got up from her chair, and waited....

      The front door was opened at once. Then came Harber's hurrying footfalls on the staircase—and, simultaneously, the garden СКАЧАТЬ