by Jane Arbor
“That you would never know, and that if you did you wouldn’t care or you would pity me? Yes.”
But they were the last coherent words he allowed her for a long time. His lips searched for hers, found them and silenced them with kisses which she gave back ... and back again.
Now, very close, but the storm of their passion spent for a while, they sat talking. They did not hear Martha come to the door to see why Miss Sarah had not asked for her tea; nor knew that at the low murmur of their voices, she had tiptoed away again.
As if they both needed to expunge and exercise Jurice’s evil by bringing it out into the open, they had talked of her again. Among other things Sarah heard of her drab little masquerade which had given the tennis match in their favor; Oliver, of the slander which Dick Finder’s concern for Sarah had brought to her.
That brought in Dick’s name and sure now, safe now, Oliver told her without rancor of how he had come to ask her to dinner that night and had retreated, his pride with love both daunted by the sight of her and Dick silhouetted in an embrace in the doorway. But he still needed to ask,
“What is Finder to you, Sarah? What has he been?”
She smiled up at him. “Only another friend, as far as I’m concerned. He’ll always be that, I hope. But that night he had asked me to marry him—”
“And you said—?”
“No, of course.”
“Why? For your carreer’s sake? Or even then, dare I hope, because of me?” Oliver wanted to know.
“Then, not consciously because of you,” she told him. “I only knew that I didn’t love Dick enough to marry him. And bless his good heart, he didn’t let it alter anything else between us. You mustn’t be jealous of him; you can’t be. He’s rather a Victorian type really, he simply won’t allow that women should be given their head in their own affairs. I set up Monckton in the teeth of his opposition which was quite as damping as yours at first. But since then he has swung the other way. Now he is suggesting I should branch out in a big way, turn into a Limited Company or something, in time for Fareborough’s expansion.”
“And that mightn’t be such a bad idea,” mused Oliver. “For as you are going to marry me and that very soon, have you thought what is to become of Monckton?”
Sarah’s face fell. “No, that is—oh Oliver, now I’ve started it, I can’t abandon it just like that! I can’t!”
“Not even if I insist that marriage to me will be a full time job? There you are, the conflict you claimed would solve itself when the time came. So now what’s your choice—your job or me?”
She said gravely, “You of course, without question. But—” she stopped as her glance caught the quirk of amusement at the corner of his mouth, the teasing glint in his eye. She threw herself into his arms again. “Oh Oliver, you wretch, you were only making me eat my own words, when I thought for one awful moment you were serious!”
He dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. “I was testing your wifely compliance,” he said. “But now were agreed that I do rate higher than Monckton, I repeat that I think Finder has got something in this idea of his. You needn’t go headlong at it, but that should be the way of Monckton’s future, I think, a gradual division of responsibility and work, with yours the controlling finger for as long as you like to keep it there.”
“Now you are doing a Dick, beginning to manage me too!” she accused him happily.
“And who with a better right?” he retorted. “And now what about our own plans? How soon are you going to marry me and move over to Greystones?”
“To—?” She sat up sharply, but he only laughed at her dismay.
“It’s all right,” he assured her. “We shall have it to ourselves and you’ll be its only mistress. As I told you, the place itself is mine and, failing to buy yours as an annexe, Kate is moving the Nursing Home, lock, stock and barrel, to Brighton. So now my thorny little pocket enterprise, when are you going to marry me?”
She met the eager light in his eyes. “As soon as you say, if you’re quite, quite sure you want me,” she told him.
“And how sure is ‘quite, quite’? If you mean sure for ever, then that’s all right with me,” he countered. And as his arms drew her to him for a kiss which was to seal their future, all hope, all certainty was in his voice.
THE END
