Unknown Read Online Free Page A

catching on at last?’
    ‘No.’
    Then Mr Aston was wrong when he said you had high intelligence. I’d label you dumb.’
    ‘Please tell me—and you can leave out Mr Aston.’
    He shrugged. ‘Very well then. You’ve been bequeathed ... or would have been under different circumstances ... a very comfortable sum. In short—a fortune.’
    ‘From Jerry?’
    ‘From Jeremy. But’ ... and the man beside Paddy paused significantly ... ‘only, at that irresponsible age, if I say so. Ordinarily I would say so, and readily. I have more than enough money of my own. But I’m not satisfied, Miss Travis, and that’s why I’ve brought you up here. I want to know why Jeremy did it, also how I’m to react.’
    ‘You?’ she queried.
    ‘I was his mentor, teacher, authoritarian, guardian, adviser. You have to be to an afterthought brother who arrives when you yourself are almost a man. Because Jeremy was immature, and because I was responsible for him, I am now in the position of judge. Well, have we got that straight in the end?’
    ‘You might have,’ said Paddy coldly. ‘I haven’t.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No. Also I don’t intend to try. So just turn back to the station, Mr David.’
    ‘You mean the conditional stop? Turnabout Creek? But there’s no train either way before tomorrow morning, and even then only if you ring the nearest station for them to alert the guard, and there’s no phone until we reach the house.’
    ‘I’m resigning,' she snapped.
    ‘Before you even start?’
    ‘Yes. I couldn’t work for a man like you.'
    ‘I gathered in a calling like this that you worked for the ideal, not the employer.'
    ‘Sometimes the employer makes that impossible. You would.’
    ‘All very well, but aren't you forgetting the agreement you signed?’
    ‘No, I’m not forgetting, but what else, apart from my having to borrow from someone to repay you for my ticket and anything else you have put out, could my resignation mean to me?’
    ‘It could cancel any future assignments through the C.F.A.’
    She had not thought of that, had not thought that anyone would be so mean as to think of it either, but a glance at the man beside her told her that he would ... and had.
    ‘Then I’ll scrub floors. Or wash dishes. Or ’
    ‘Or marry ? That’s another idea for you now that your previous one has gone sour. Tell me’ ... before she could break in ... ‘how did you find out Jeremy’s potential?’
    ‘Potential?’ she queried.
    ‘What he could one day mean in the almighty dollar?’
    ‘I hate you! You’re the worst man I could even dream up in a ghastly nightmare.—But tell me something for a change. Why do you despise me this much?’
    ‘Because,' said Magnus David, reaching the top of the mountain at last and turning into a drive that seemed suddenly to have opened up from nowhere, ‘I loved him.’
    ‘Loved him?’
    ‘Loved my brother Jeremy.’ He halted the big black car at a big white edifice. ‘I loved him very much.’
    He leaned across her and opened her door. ‘Madam, we’ve arrived.’
     

CHAPTER THREE
    It was not a house, it was a castle—that was Paddy’s first impression. Almost she turned to the man now obviously awaiting her reaction to fling at him:
    ‘It’s a castle, and you are its king.’
    She might as well have said it. Just as he had read her before, Magnus David read her again.
    ‘No, not the king, merely the owner. There are a number of such castles dotted around the north coast, built either by exiled remittance lords or ambitious onetime stablehands who made good in their new country and proved it in the best manner they could think. A fine house.’
    ‘Castle,’ she corrected. .
    ‘Castle, castelo , palace, palacio , call it what you will so long as it’s home. But I forgot, it’s not to be that to you.’
    ‘You mean I can go after all?’ she asked eagerly.
    ‘No, I meant you would never allow it to be your home.’
    ‘With you in it? No,’ she agreed definitely.