Yours to Command

by Mary Burchell

  “Oh—I meant later than that.”

  He looked surprised.

  “During the scene in the study? I thought he conducted that rather well,” Lucas conceded generously.

  “Oh, yes—yes. It was nothing that he did.” Sydney looked agitated suddenly. But Lucas, seeing that, drew her head down tenderly against his shoulder and said, “What’s the matter, my darling? What upset you?”

  “It—it was the way you said goodbye to Anne,” she whispered.

  “How did I say goodbye to Anne?” he enquired obtusely.

  “Oh, Lucas! She—she almost put her arms round your neck, and you kissed her—not carelessly, but properly—and—and I could have k-killed her.”

  “Darling—my dear, sweet, well-balanced little darling! You were jealous," he cried delightedly.

  “Of course I was jealous! Who wouldn’t have been?” Even now she was angry as she remembered the pain of it. “Only—I knew suddenly that if I could feel so wild with jealousy, there was only one reason.”

  “God bless Anne—for once,” he said gaily.

  “But why did you kiss her like that? Why?”

  He stopped laughing then.

  “I suppose,” he said slowly, “I felt better towards her than I had for months. We’d talked together for a long time in Lulworth’s study, and she admitted at last that she didn’t really want the children with her. Alistair hadn’t impressed her well, to say the least of it. And I suppose she realized too that it was no good trying to pick up any of the old threads, with me. She was almost—friendly about it...”

  “She was rather over-friendly about it,” Sydney put in, which made him laugh again.

  “I meant during the discussion,” he explained. “She had obviously made some final decision, involving another man, I imagine, though she didn’t say so. She merely told me that she would be leaving again for the States quite soon, and that she was willing to leave the boys with me. I was so relieved that I could have hugged her.”

  “You did, more or less,” Sydney reminded him.

  “Oh—well”—Lucas looked amused again and as though he were recalling the scene only with an effort—“we were saying a final goodbye, with most of the rancour smoothed away. She played her part beautifully, with an entirely synthetic catch in her voice as she asked me to be sure to look after the boys well.”

  “You played your part very thoroughly too,” Sydney said.

  “But I always do, my darling, I’m famous for my leavetakings,” Lucas assured her gaily. At which Sydney laughed a good deal, and then flung her arms round his neck and kissed him in the immensity of her relief.

  “Is it all right now?” he asked softly.

  “If you truly love me.”

  “I truly love you. More than anyone else or anything else in the whole wide world,” he assured her. “When are you going to marry me?”

  “At the end of the term,” Sydney said. “I gave in my notice to Hugh this evening.”

  “Superb timing,” he remarked approvingly. And then they both laughed and kissed each other again. And so absorbed were they in the realization of their own radiant happiness that neither of them heard the door open, and neither of them saw Curtis standing on the threshold, surveying this unrehearsed scene.

  He observed them rather owlishly through his spectacles for a few moments, and then, with natural instinct for a scene which must not be interrupted, he withdrew, closing the door silently behind him.