“You are not in love with me!”
His hand dropped from her shoulder. He too leaned back.
“It depends what you mean by being in love.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean!”
He said lightly,
“The gilt on the gingerbread-the icing on the cake?”
“No, I don’t mean that.”
“A lot of people do. What do you mean then? Spring fever? The feeling that you’ve got seven-league boots and can go racing off to the ends of the earth to bring back some entire and perfect chrysolite for the beloved one? The magnificent and ridiculous ecstasy of eighteen? It doesn’t last, you know, my dear-it doesn’t last.”
She thought, “He felt that for Verona Grey. He will never feel it for me.”
His hand touched hers and withdrew again.
“The chrysolite doesn’t keep the home fires burning, and you can’t live by moonshine or the cosmic rays.”
The anger went out of Susan. She was dimmed and extinguished. She felt quite intolerably flat and middle-aged. Only when you are really middle-aged there are not so many dull, lean years stretching out before you as there are at twenty-two.
“I can’t marry anyone who doesn’t love me. And you don’t. I suppose you are fond of me, but you don’t love me.”
He leaned forward and took her hands. She despised herself quite a lot for feeling that it was comfortable to have them held. He said,
“Now that is where you are entirely wrong. I love you quite a lot. If it isn’t the way you want, well that’s just too bad. I think it’s quite a good way myself, because it’s got roots in the things that matter, and that means it will go on growing. It has grown quite a lot in the last few days. It mayn’t sound romantic, but that depends on what you think about romance. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be like charity and begin at home. You know, if I had to choose one word to tell you what you stand for, it would be that. I can’t think of having a home without you. It mayn’t mean anything to you, but to me it does mean everything I thought I was never going to have-everything that seemed to have dried up in me-everything that you’ve brought back and called to life again.”
All the cool, deliberate control was gone. His eyes were wet, and his voice stumbled and broke. There didn’t seem to be any moment in which she moved towards him, there was certainly no moment in which she spoke, but she found that she was in his arms, and that it was the only right and happy place for her to be.
She took up his word and made it her own. She had come home.
Patricia Wentworth
Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.
Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.
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The Watersplash Page 25
