Bargain Wife

by Mary Burchell

  ‘Swine,’ said Charles without heat.

  ‘Charles, he’s dead now.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed thoughtfully. ‘As you said like a judgment.’

  She smiled faintly and murmured:

  ‘You’re not superstitious, are you?’

  ‘No. Only in so far as I think something would have brought you half-way across the world to me, even if it hadn’t been your own criminal tendencies,’ he told her teasingly.

  She laughed softly.

  ‘It’s funny. I remember now that night I left America, and the lights of New York were slipping away behind us, I thought “I’m like the girl in all the fairy stories, setting out into the world alone. A new life, even a new identity. Where will my wanderings take me?” ’

  He looked down at her and smiled as she lay there in the circle of his arm.

  ‘And I think,’ he said, ‘that you are satisfied with the place to which they brought you.’