Tell Me My Fortune Read Online Free Page B

TWO
    LESLIE had never felt faint in her life, but for a moment it seemed to her that the green and gold and blue of that summer afternoon ran together in one blur, and she clutched at Reid Carthay’s arm as though she might fall.
    “I’m terribly sorry,” he began.
    Then she recovered herself and stammered, “No, I’m sorry. I felt rather strange for a moment.”
    “I didn’t realize that it would be quite such a shock.” He was looking down at her with some concern.
    “No. How could you?” She looked round helplessly on a world from which the benevolent security of Great-Aunt Tabitha’s influence had departed for ever. It was difficult, in face of the bright, slightly puzzled glance of this stranger, to explain how completely they had all left everything to chance and Great-Aunt Tabitha. But she felt bound to try.
    “We have always depended on her, you see. On the belief that our futures were secure because we should inherit. We built our lives on the expectation one shouldn’t, of course but we never thought of anything else. We never imagined there could be anyone else. We just knew, quite simply, that we were her only real relations.”
    “Yes. I do see. My people come from the other side, of course. Great-Uncle Leopold’s side.”
    “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Where the money really came from.”
    “All right. I suppose that is literally true,” he agreed. “Though anything there was had belonged to the old lady for nearly half a century.”
    From the house came the tinkling sound of the tea-bell, and she dragged herself to her feet.
    “We shall have to go in. I suppose you want me to explain things?”
    He seemed surprised.
    “You? Certainly not. You’ve had enough shock and nerve-strain already,” he said. “I’ll tell your father, and he can break the news to the rest as he pleases.”
    “It will be a fearful shock for him.” Her mouth trembled suddenly. “Please be as gentle as you can about it.”
    He smiled rather wryly.
    “Gentleness isn’t much in my line, but I’ll do my best.”
    “Perhaps I’d better do it, after all.” Once more she tried to force herself to the task. But he refused to hear of it.
    “No, no, you leave that to me. I’ll attend to it.”
    “When?” she asked huskily.
    “As soon as tea is over, arid I can have a few minutes’ private talk with him.”
    “Very well.”
    She wondered how she was to get through tea without betraying her agitation, and perhaps he wondered too, because, as they went back into the house, he said,
    “You’d better go and fix a bit of colour, hadn’t you? They’ll notice, if you look as white as that, and think that I’ve been ill-treating you or something.”
    She gave a ghost of a laugh.
    “Do I look as bad as that?”
    He gave her that peculiar, flashing glance of appreciation.
    “You look swell,” he told her, with the faintest suggestion of a drawl in his voice. “But you need the illusion of a little red blood in your cheeks.”
    She said nothing to that, and went away upstairs to her room, leaving him to find his own way back to the drawing-room.
    In her bedroom she stood before the mirror and stared at her white reflection, while she tried to take in what had really happened. As the realization of the disaster stabbed her afresh, one or two sobbing gasps of sheer fright and distress escaped her.
    Then she pulled herself together and told herself not to be a coward. And after touching her cheeks with colour and adding a little lipstick to her mouth, she deliberately assumed an air of casual unconcern.
    “There’s always Oliver,” she told herself, leaning on that final security with infinite relief. “I’ll think of something for the family. Poor darlings, it’s going to be fearful for them. But at least I have Oliver. What should I do, if I hadn’t him?”
    As soon as tea was over, their visitor got up and said to his host,
    “May I have a word or two with you, sir, in private?—It’s a matter of