Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free Page A

many years of long summer afternoons. Going to the wide wooden sill I looked out. The panes had been shut and the humidity controls would open them when the right time came; their polish dazzled me. But I could see a blue roof at my right from the protruding lower wing of the house, a shining circle of gravel between lawns of that deep emerald richness that centuries of lawn sprinklers and rolling and cutting alone can bring, and, just ahead beyond the lawns and bright flower beds, the first silent sentinels of the orchard that lay on this side of the house. A deep quietness that hung over the scene affected me; even though the windows were closed, a hush, a waiting expectant hush, persisted and grew, as a spiritual continuation of that mood of the morning when I had walked here with Pomfret in that saffron early light. I turned away quickly, astonished and moved.
    A girl walked silently toward me from the far door.
    For a moment, not quite with it, I stared foolishly, mouth agape and eyes still dazzled by the sunshine.
    Then, remembering that I was on dry land and my wetneck forthrightness would not be welcomed—or even I derated—here, I moved with a mechanical precision lo stare up at the nearest picture, too late to realize that they had, of course, all been taken away.
    Like a cretin gaping at the moon I stood—and she laughed.
    She laughed at me.
    Not since leaving home had I been so pleased to hear another person’s laughter.
    “You can, my dear lady,” I told her, “laugh as much as you wish. It is better than champagne at this moment to a desert-dry traveler.”
    “I’m sorry—but you looked so—so—”
    “Silly?”
    Her wide-spaced blue eyes opened in injured innocence—with everything else she had she was an actress loo, then—and she was about to say something very tart, I could see, when a strange expression clouded those eves and she pouted her soft pink lips. “Yes,” she said gently. “But only in a startled, small-boy way, as though you’d been caught scrumping.”
    “And that wouldn’t be the first time, either.” I smiled at her. I liked the look of her. Young, her body was trim and compact and curved just right in a demure but absolutely right dark blue suit—the sensation of her being just right for the situation became the dominant impression she conveyed to me. Her features while not beautiful were just right for a young, pretty, athletic girl on a bright day of early summer.
    “You’re buying?” I inquired politely. We had not moved from the window with the rectangle of lighter colored wood at our feet, the long plum-colored drapes of the curtains brushing the floor, with the empty spaces beneath their lights and hooks on the walls at our side.
    “Yes. Privately. But I’m afraid the vultures have their choice of the pickings.”
    “That’s true enough.”
    “You sound bitter—”
    “Bitter? No—the way the world is going to hell in a bucket doesn’t worry me anymore. It used to. But now I can see it’s been going to hell in a bucket for the last four or five thousand years or so—and we’re still here.” “Yes, we are. I’m Phoebe Desmond.” She said it so naturally and held out her hand with so unaffected an air that I was delighted to respond.
    “Have you fixed your eye on anything particular?” “Oh, yes.” She laughed, her head thrown back, her long white neck bubbling with good humor. “I want that dinky little doll’s house with all the furniture and automatic dolls—the electronics are beyond my understanding but Timmy—that’s my nephew—will love to run them for his sister Dolly—my niece and the girl for whom I want the doll’s house.”
    "I wouldn’t be too sure about that brother-sister relationship unless you know them very well.”
    “There’s that bitter echo again—”
    “Oh, no, that’s not fair! I may have been thinking of my Aunt Nora, but you’ve no right to strike me below the belt!”
    She laughed again.
    “Anyway, I