Tell Me My Fortune Read Online Free Page A

Magna seemed suddenly rather a delicate, pastel-coloured, unrealistic sort of setting for him, and a vague feeling of apprehension touched Leslie because of it.
    However, her mother rose just then to escort their visitor to his room, and the others prepared to scatter, to get ready for tea.
    Leslie lingered for a moment to speak to Morley and, seeing this, Katherine came back to join them.
    “What did you make of him, Leslie? You seemed to be great friends in a remarkably short time,” she said curiously.
    “We were nothing of the sort.” Leslie spoke with decision. “It was he who made all the advances. I should think he’s the kind of man to call you ‘honey’ the second time he meets you.”
    “There is a slight American accent,” Morley remarked. “I noticed it.”
    “Oh, that’s what it is! I didn’t identify it, because there’s an overlay of something else.”
    “Probably a slightly French intonation. He looks the kind of man who’s knocked about a good deal.”
    “He settled down pretty close to Great-Aunt Tabitha,” remarked Leslie.
    But Morley said, “Miaow!” and ruffled her fair hair.
    “Why did he come, though?” Katherine said reflectively.
    “Perhaps he heard that Father had three beautiful daughters, all now richly endowed,” suggested Morley. “And he came to look them over.”
    “Then Kate and Alma can have him between them,” Leslie said, with so much energy that her brother and sister both laughed.
    She laughed a little herself then, slightly ashamed of her exaggerated resentment of someone who was, after all, a guest, and had not been guilty of anything more than familiarity.
    “No, it couldn’t have been that,” she said, referring back to Morley’s flippant suggestion. “I remember now. He asked if I were the only daughter.”
    “He hoped it all went with you, dear,” Morley declared, and laughed again.
    “Don’t be absurd,” Leslie said. Then she remembered that she had left her various purchases in the car, and went out to fetch them.
    As she came out of the front door, she saw that he was also there, taking his luggage out of the back of the car, and at the sound of her footsteps he looked up.
    He stopped what he was doing immediately, and came to the bottom of the steps and said,
    “Look here, I must talk to you. Where can we go?”
    Leslie’s eyebrows rose slightly and her dark eyes widened with surprise and that queer resentment which she could not control.
    “It’s almost teatime,” she said rather coldly.
    “Yes, I know. But there’s something I must ask you.”
    He was so urgent and so authoritative about it that she found herself leading the way to the small shrubbery at the side of the house. But they had hardly moved within the shade of the trees, before she turned to face him and asked, not very promisingly, because she suspected some new, smiling advance,
    “Well, what is it?”
    He was not smiling, however. He was frowning slightly, and his very keen grey eyes were a little narrowed, as though he were trying to see something a long way off.
    ‘“What makes your father think he was old Aunt Tabitha’s heir?” was the extraordinary thing he said.
    “What makes him think—Well, because he is, of course. He always has been. She made a will soon after her husband died, when Father was still a schoolboy. We’ve all known it all our lives.”
    Her rapid assurances trailed off suddenly into silence, and the most horrible, premonitory chill crept down her spine.
    “You don’t mean—you can’t mean—that she didn’t leave him her money, after all?”
    Reid Carthay thrust his hands into his pockets and regarded her almost moodily for a moment, like a man who very much disliked some task he saw in front of him.
    “That’s exactly what I do mean,” he said at last. “She left her money to me. Every damned cent of it. I didn’t even know you people existed until I began to look through her correspondence, after she was dead.”

 
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