Firefly Summer Read Online Free

does the master of your house escape this great cultural event?’ Fergus Slattery asked with envy.
    ‘Someone has to run the bar. I know it looks as if half the county is here, but you’d be surprised how many men find the excuse for a drink when their children are up here on the stage,’ Kate said.
    ‘Well for him, then.’ Fergus was genuinely admiring. ‘Ican’t say that I have to work on a Saturday evening, they don’t think solicitors work at all, but my office is too near. I’d actually have to be in the window in my shirt sleeves before they’d believe me.’
    Fergus grinned boyishly. He was very like a tall gangly boy, Kate thought, though he must be in his mid or late twenties now. She had always thought of him as a kind of irrepressible student home for the holidays. Even though he ran his father’s office almost entirely on his own now, it was hard for her to think of him as a grown-up. Maybe it was because he looked untidy; his hair was sort of jutting out at an angle no matter whether he had been to the barber or not. His shirts were perfectly and lovingly ironed by the Slatterys’ faithful housekeeper, Miss Purcell, yet the collars sometimes stood at an angle away from his neck. Kate wouldn’t be at all surprised if he bought the wrong size or had the button in the wrong place. He had dark eyes and if he had held himself differently and worn long smooth dark coats he might have been thought very handsome and elegant indeed.
    But part of his charm was that he would never be elegant; he was totally unaware of his tall, dark and almost handsome looks, and that he had caused many a flutter and several specific hopes around Mountfern.
    ‘You mean you wouldn’t want to come – what with that Nora Lynch killing herself to impress you?’ Kate was disbelieving.
    ‘Impress
me
!’
    ‘Of course. Why else would that young girl kill herself and show herself to be part of a small backwater like this unless it was to prove to you that she could fit in and be part of it?’
    ‘But why would she prove that to me?’
    ‘Aren’t you and she going out?’ Kate wondered about men a lot. They couldn’t all be as dim as they often seemed.
    ‘Yes, sure, we go out to the pictures and we go to a dance, but there’s nothing in it.’ Fergus looked baffled and honest.
    ‘What do you mean there’s nothing in it, aren’t you a right beast to be leading her on and then tell me there’s nothing in it? You know, the older I get the more I believe the nuns were right, men are basically wild animals at heart.’
    ‘But there
is
nothing in it,’ Fergus pleaded. ‘I mean we don’t love each other or anything, or have the same plans or the same hopes. Nothing’s been said or agreed. Truly.’
    ‘I believe you.’ Kate was cynical. ‘O Lord, protect me or mine from ever falling for a lawyer. You’ll have yourself covered from every angle.’
    ‘But she doesn’t think . . .’ Fergus began, but at that moment Nora Lynch, resplendent in a new hair-do from the Rosemarie salon, in a new yellow dress short enough to be fashionable but not so short as to cause adverse comment from the canon, the nuns and the brothers, appeared on stage. She said she hoped everyone would enjoy this show, the first combined effort; she thanked the canon, the brothers, the convent and the sponsors, the children and the parents, and knew that everyone would have a wonderful evening. She said that as an outsider she felt very privileged to be allowed to get involved in something as much a part of the community as this was. But then in many ways she felt that she had always been part of this place and always would.
    ‘How old are you, Fergus Slattery?’ Kate whispered suddenly.
    ‘I’m twenty-seven,’ he replied, confused.
    ‘Twenty-seven years in the world and you try to tell me that young woman has no hopes of you. May God forgive you, I mean it, Fergus, may he forgive you and send you some kind of sense.’
    ‘Thanks, Kate,’ said