Read Online Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen MacInnes - Free Book Online

smell of hay and farm mud and sawed wood and barns, the smell of the hilly meadows which stretched out between the houses, the smell of the woods circling around. “Strange how quickly the country begins outside of a Swiss city,” she said. She was perpetually surprised by the shortness of distances in Switzerland.
    She frowned, thinking up another reason to keep Francesca in Bern. “Still, I wish you’d call up your aunt and tell her there’s a spare bed here for you tonight. Listen to that rain!”
    “I’m a country girl nowadays,” Francesca reminded her. “What’s rain?”
    “You’ll come down with another attack of grippe. Besides, if you go back to Falken, I’ll have to spend a wet Thursday night all by myself in Bern.”
    Francesca smiled. “Yes, Thursday makes a wet night particularly bad.”
    “Then you’ll stay?” Paula asked quickly, pressing her advantage. “Wonderful. Where shall we eat?”
    But Francesca was having a mild attack of after-thought. “I really ought to go back tonight.” There was a Committee meeting tomorrow morning, for one thing. But there wasn’t too much self-persuasion in her voice.
    Paula, sighing, said, “It’s funny, isn’t it, how a woman can’t enjoy an evening alone—unless she stays inside her hotel and then finds a good book for bed.”
    “Which only proves you’re virtuous, darling.”
    “Aren’t most of us? And it isn’t virtue so much either as— just hating to be annoyed, or to be judged for something you aren’t. Now, if Andy were alone in Bern, he’d drop into a bar for a cocktail, then have a decent little dinner anywhere, but anywhere , he liked. Then he’d take in a theatre, or a movie, or go for a walk through the streets. And then he’d end with a nightcap at a place like the Café Henzi. But could I do that by myself?”
    “Not for very long.”
    “I couldn’t stay myself for very long, either. I couldn’t be natural.”
    “Not honestly natural,” Francesca said. “I hate innocence when it starts pretending it doesn’t know. Either it becomes aggressive. Or artful. Which is the worse?”
    “The question that’s occupying my stomach at the moment is—where shall we find that decent little dinner Andy would go out and have?”
    Francesca glanced down at her clothes.
    Paula said, “If I looked as well in a blouse and skirt as you do, I’d wear it dining at the Ritz. Look, why don’t I call your aunt while you think of food? You know, if inspiration fails you, I shouldn’t mind going back to the Café Henzi again. I liked it.”
    “Did you?” There was a half-smile round Francesca’s lips.
    “I’d like to hear that singing.”
    “That happens much later in the evening.”
    “Then what about going on there, after dinner?”
    “What about that telephone call?” Francesca closed her eyes, thinking how delightful it was to allow yourself to be completely lackadaisical. And if Aunt Louisa raised any objections to this overnight stay in town, then Paula would be able to deal more firmly with them. It was strange: there was Aunt Louisa, Swiss born and bred, still living in her grandfather’s house where she and Francesca’s mother had grown up together, a placid calm woman in a placid quiet village, and she did nothing but worry secretly. And there, on the other hand, had been Francesca’s father, an Italian, a professor of music, living in a voluble excitable little Italian town—and had he ever worried at all? Perhaps emotion, when it is tightly disciplined, turns into worry. Perhaps her father, with his laughter and passion and arguments and music, perhaps he had had no emotion left over to be turned into any of the negative fears. And perhaps, she thought (as her Swiss mother might have thought), perhaps it might have been better for us all if he had known worry, been less confident about people, been more wary of treachery. And that was another strange thing: after an injury had been done to him, the Italian would