Never Call It Love Read Online Free Page B

But there was an
urgency in that one blue eye that made him bend closer.
    "...
can say it... now. I love you."
    He
felt as if a metal band had tightened around his throat. There was no mistaking
her meaning. To him, she had been at most like a young sister, and he had
believed her feeling for him to be of the same order. Now, for the first time,
he realized what impossible longings had swelled her young heart, perhaps even
as she said, "It is kind of you, Patrick, to speak of me to fine people
like the Cobbins," and, "Yes, Patrick, I think Thomas Cobbin is a
very seemly young man."
    Again
the swollen lips stirred. "I... did wrong. But I did not want to shame you
before the Cobbins by being late. That is why..."
    The
whispering voice ceased. The blue eye turned vacant. He reached a hand to the
thin wrist. No beat of life against his fingertips. He put his hand down under
the sheet and rested it just below the small left breast. No sign of breathing
or of heartbeat.
    The
doctor said stiffly, "Perhaps it would be better that I, a physician, ascertain..."
    Not
answering, Patrick turned away from the cubicle and stared at the floor. After a
moment the doctor said, "This young woman is dead." Patrick was aware
of the man's movements as he drew the sheet up over Anne's face.
    "You
say, Sir Patrick, that she was your ward?"
    "Yes."
    "Then
you intend to make arrangements..."
    "I
will pay for the coffin. Her aunt will accompany the body to Ireland for
burial."
    He
himself would not be standing in the churchyard in her native village when
Anne's body was lowered into the ground. Now he had urgent business here. He
strode back through the wards. You won't go unavenged, Anne, he promised
silently. Someone will pay for your death.
    In
the hospital courtyard he entered the waiting carriage. "Where is the
nearest place to hire a mount?"
    "That
would be Gorman's, sir, just off the Strand."
    "Take
me to my lodgings first." He would have to tell Maude Reardon the news.
"Then take me to Gorman's."
    It
would mean riding half the night. But by morning he would know the first thing
he had to find out—whether or not young Montlow was still at Oxford.

CHAPTER 4
    The
small side parlor at the Hedges was warm and peaceful, its silence broken only
by small domestic sounds—the snapping of the fire in the grate, a faint rustle
as Elizabeth Montlow turned the pages of her book, and now and
then, whenever the embroidery thread knotted, an annoyed exclamation from Mrs.
Montlow.
    Now
and then Elizabeth glanced up from the page to enjoy the dim reflection of
firelight and candle flame in the long glass doors opposite. Beyond them she
could see, bathed in the blue light of early evening, the brick terrace with
its rose trellis. The espaliered rose vine was bare now, but no matter. Just as
she enjoyed the other seasons here in the country, she enjoyed the winter
months. In leafless winter you could see the basic shape of things, the low
rock walls hemming in brown fields, and the inverted-heart shape of beeches
against the sky, and the meandering branches of that rose vine out there.
    Sighing,
Mrs. Montlow laid her embroidery hoop on the rosewood stand beside her wing
chair. She was a slender, pretty woman of forty-odd, with graying blond hair,
blue eyes, and almost doll-like features. "Three more weeks," she
said.
    Even
if her mother's gaze had not gone to the portrait above the fireplace,
Elizabeth would have known what she meant. Three more weeks until Christopher
came home for the Christmas holidays.
    Elizabeth
too looked up at the portrait. Christopher had been eleven when John Montlow,
as one of his last extravagant acts, had commissioned Sir Joshua Reynolds to
paint his son. In the portrait, Christopher, wearing a red velvet suit, stood
with one hand resting on the head of a half-grown mastiff. His other hand held
his plumed red hat. His seraphically handsome face, framed in pale
shoulder-length curls, looked at the viewer with a smile that would have