With All My Worldly Goods Read Online Free

was seething with indignation. Was the creature entirely insensitive? How did he suppose she liked having the request put like that? Martin would have died rather than put any girl in such a position.
    There was nothing she could say in front of the hotel clerk, of course, and she followed the page into the lift in wordless anger.
    The moment she was alone in her room, she tossed off her hat and coat, and walked up and down in restless fury. Her father had no right to have put her in this position. Bruce Mickleham was the last person on earth to be entrusted with the tactful and sympathetic handling of a very unhappy girl.
    At the thought of how unhappy she was, she felt her mouth quiver. The tears had been very near for some while now, and she bit her lip, trembling on the edge of a storm of grief.
    But at that moment there was a knock on the sitting-room door.
    “Come in.”
    She turned quickly as Bruce Mickleham came in.
    He glanced round the room quite calmly.
    “Are you comfortable here? Got everything you want?” He was not personally exercised on her behalf, she felt sure. Merely carrying out a tiresome duty in every particular.
    “No. I am not comfortable here,” she exclaimed, her blue eyes flashing angrily. “Have you no decency at all? Insisting on even being in the same corridor. What do you suppose the hotel staff thought?”
    He looked amused and surprised.
    ‘They probably think you’re my niece—if they think about it at all. If you’re imagining they will take you for my mistress, let me assure you that no one as experienced as a hotel clerk would take you for anything of the sort.”
    Leonora gasped.
    “Isn’t that rather an unnecessarily insulting remark?” she said coldly.
    “Why? Have you any special ambitions to look that type?” He seemed still more amused.
    There didn’t seem to be an adequate retort to that, and for a moment she felt her mouth tremble again.
    “My dear child,” he said reasonably, “must I remind you again that I have undertaken to look after you? I couldn’t very well do that if we were in different hotels you know.”
    “I’m not a child,” Leonora murmured, resentful and unhappy.
    “No?” he said coldly. “Well, you have behaved exactly like one from the moment we met this afternoon.”
    Leonora was dismayedly silent. She felt the charge was largely unmerited, but she was aware that she had been behaving distinctly pettishly in the last few minutes.
    She suddenly swallowed her wrath and looked up with a smile that was more winning than she knew.
    “I’m sorry.” She held out her hand to him. “I expect I have been silly. But I’m very miserable about daddy, you know.”
    She was almost amused to see how taken aback he was at her smile. He took her hand slowly and held it for a moment as though he scarcely knew what to do with it. Then he bent his head and just touched it with his lips.
    “Very well,” he said a little stiffly. Then he turned and went out of the room.
    Leonora didn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed. But she thought with a sigh that she would be immeasurably relieved when there was no longer any need to be either. She wished she could count the very hours until her father would come, and she would be free of this difficult person.
    Presently she went downstairs to have dinner, for she realized that she had had nothing at all since an early lunch—and in any case she had been too excited then to pay much attention to food.
    He joined her after a while, and though conversation seemed to flow just a little more easily than it had in the train, she still felt that uneasy constraint with him, and it was with a sense of distinct relief that a last she said good night to him and went upstairs.
    Once she was alone in her room again, she realized that it was far too early to go to bed. Yet there was nothing to do, and her own thoughts were melancholy company.
    And then, quite suddenly, the inspiration came to her. She would ring up