Read Online Choose the One You'll Marry by Mary Burchell - Free Book Online Page A

television program, I’m sure. You can congratulate yourself on having struck just the note he needed.”
    That was such a pleasant thought that she forgave him the slight criticism of Angus that his tone had implied. And presently she asked where he lived in London. “Are you near where your aunt is going to stay?”
    “Oh, didn’t you know? I’m sharing the apartment with her,” he said. “Just at the time Aunt Henrietta came to London I had to give up the furnished apartment where I was. She was very keen on our having a place together, at any rate for a time. And that’s why she asked the agents to find a fairly large apartment.
    “Then—you mean—we’ll all be living in this apartment near Regent’s Park?”
    “Yes.” He gave her an amused glance. “Do you mind?”
    “No! No, of course not.”
    But, in an odd way, she did. She found Michael Harling a difficult person to place, in her scale of likes and dislikes, and she could not quite get over the feeling that he was, in a sense, her employer. And a much less lenient employer than Mr. Naylor, she felt sure.
    “You haven’t quite forgiven me for what happened that first day, have you?” he said coolly at that moment, and he gave her another of those amused glances.
    “Oh, that isn’t true!” She blushed slightly. “I—I haven’t the least resentment about it.”
    “Not resentment, exactly. But something that has made you decide not to like me.”
    She was astonished and put out, so that she said with less than her usual tact, “I don’t dislike you.”
    “Rather negative praise,” he remarked reflectively.
    “Mr. Harling, one doesn’t have to like an employer one hardly knows.”
    “An employer?” He looked genuinely surprised. “Is that how you think of me? I was supposing we were more or less cousins.”
    “ Cousins?” In her wildest moments of fantasy, she had not thought of Mr. Harling as a cousin.
    “Well, we have Aunt Henrietta in common,” he pointed out, and this time his glance had a malicious sparkle of amusement that made her laugh a little reluctantly.
    “Aunt Henrietta is really my mother’s aunt,” she said demurely.
    “You horrid child! Are you trying to relegate me to the role of uncle?” he inquired.
    “Oh, no.”
    She supposed he was a good deal too young for that and, unknowingly, looked at him with such an air of speculation that he said obligingly, “I’m thirty-one.”
    “I—I beg your pardon.”
    “Not at all.” He evidently enjoyed her discomfiture. Perhaps in revenge for the remark about Aunt Henrietta being her mother’s aunt. “You, I suppose, are about ten years younger?”
    “Nine,” she said, and started to do some mental arithmetic on the subject of ages in general.
    “Then your mother must have been a good deal younger than Aunt Henrietta?” she said presently.
    “Not necessarily. But in point of fact, she was.”
    It struck Ruth then that, although their conversation had been conducted in quite quiet tones, it was surprising that Aunt Henrietta had not joined in. And then, turning around, she saw that she was asleep.
    Like most people, Aunt Henrietta looked curiously defenseless asleep. She lay back in the corner of the car, looking older than she did when her bright, laughing eyes were open, and there was something oddly pathetic in the unexpected downward droop of her mouth.
    “She’s asleep,” Ruth said softly to Michael Harling.
    “Is she? That’s just as well. It was an early start for her. She doesn’t usually get up until around nine.”
    “I see. Has she—I mean, she hasn’t been in this country for more than a few weeks, has she?”
    “About a couple of months.”
    “And before then, how—how long was it since you’d seen her?” Ruth asked, as carelessly as she could.
    “Oh, more than twenty years. She married and went to New Zealand, you know. Her husband died about a year after they were both there, leaving her pretty badly off, I think.”
    “And yet