The clouds were lifting over Merefields. Annabel would make a home of it. Sally was glad about that, and she was glad about David. Lucius Bellingdon could do quite a lot to help a young man with his foot on the ladder. If he made a success of Annabel’s portrait, there would be plenty of other people with commissions for him. What she knew nothing about was the scene in Lucius Bellingdon’s room when Moira had stood by his bed with a pillow in her hand and David had hauled Clay Masterson back from the window and thrown him. Whether Sally was ever to know about it or not, Lucius was not likely to forget it, and remembering, he would do what he could to repay a debt. His acknowledgment to Miss Silver had taken the form of a generous fee. In the case of David Moray there would be a commission for Annabel’s portrait and the consequent mention of his name in circles where there is still money enough to keep the wolf from a painter’s door. David would have been stupid if he had not been aware that the way up the ladder was now clear before him, but to the end of his days he would regret the lost Medusa.
These things lay between them. On the surface Sally said,
“I’m glad they’re going to be married. They are just right for each other. I could be friends with her, but I don’t suppose I shall ever see her again.”
“I don’t see why not.”
Sally threw him a glance.
“I don’t see why.”
“When we are married-”
“When we are what?”
David said, “Married.”
“Who said we were going to be married?” Sally hoped her voice wasn’t shaking, but she had a horrid feeling that it was.
David sat at the other end of the sofa and frowned at her. All at once he crossed the gap, took both her hands in his, and said,
“We hadn’t got down to saying things, but you knew. You’ve always known-haven’t you? I have. I knew the very first minute when I ran into you on the stairs and nearly knocked you down and Paulina said you were her first-floor flat and your name was Sally Foster. And I said to myself then, ‘Well some day it will be Sally Moray, because she’s going to be my wife, and I’ll always be able to say that I made up my mind in that very first minute.’ ”
“David, I don’t see how you could!”
“It doesn’t take me any time at all to make up my mind-not about important things.”
“It’s taken you time enough to tell me. I thought you were falling in love with Moira Herne.”
“Her? I just wanted to paint her.”
“How was I to know that? You never took your eyes off her!”
“You can’t paint a woman if you don’t look at her-at least I can’t. Sally, I want to paint you-I’ve wanted to paint you all along! Only I was afraid if I did that I’d be saying all the kind of things I had made up my mind I wasn’t going to say until I’d got on a bit.”
He had his arms round her, and there was something in his voice that tugged at her heart. She gave him the smile which he had always found undermining.
“What sort of things, darling? Nice ones?”
He nodded. It was getting difficult to speak.
Sally said softly,
“Why don’t you say some of them now?”
Patricia Wentworth
Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.
Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.
