Read Online The Chinese Shawl by Patricia Wentworth - Free Book Online Page A

to be left alone. Her first overwhelming feeling that here was a house which she could love and which was friendly to her had given way to a lonely sense of estrangement. It was only the outside of the house which had any welcome for her. The inner self, the presence which lives in every habitation, was formidably antagonistic and aloof.
    The room in which she found herself, with its pale blue chintzes patterned with ivory scallop shells, was a stranger’s room. It was charming, and it charmed her, but it had nothing to do with Laura Fane. Like all the rest of the house, it rejected her.
    She went to the left-hand window and looked out. The curtains had been drawn. She put one of them back, noticing that it had been lined with black sateen to make it light-proof, and wondered whether they had had any raids down here. She looked out upon the courtyard. The dusk was gathering fast. There were shadows everywhere. The line of the ruined Priory church ran out on her left, with the last of the light coming over and through the shattered arches. She stayed looking at it for as long as she dared. Then she tidied herself in a hurry and went down.
    chapter 11
    The drawing-room was full of people having tea. Lucy Adams was pouring out from an immense silver teapot. Laura went up to take her cup, and was introduced to “my friend Miss Silver.” She beheld a little middle-aged person with small, neat features and a great deal of mouse-coloured hair neatly disposed in a coiled plait at the back and severely restrained by a net in front. She received the impression that it was never let out even at night. She thought, “You couldn’t possibly take her for anything but a governess.” Only it was a governess of the early Edwardian days, or perhaps something earlier still. Aunt Theresa had possessed Victorian books, and Laura had been brought up on them.
    Miss Silver, like Cousin Lucy, wore glacé shoes with bows, and strange thick stockings. She was dressed in one of those flowered garments which saleswomen press upon unresisting elderly ladies for summer wear. In Miss Silver’s case it consisted of a dark green dress lavishly patterned with a kind of Morse code of dots and dashes in orange, magenta, and green. The accompanying coatee was mercifully of a plain dark green. The collarless neck had been filled in with a twist of cotton lace, and was fastened by a heavy oval gold locket-brooch bearing in seed pearls the entwined initials of Miss Silver’s father and mother, now some forty years deceased.
    Laura had not time to do more than say how do you do before she was directed to a chair which had apparently been kept for her beside Agnes Fane. She was received with a surface tinge of graciousness and questioned about her work, her interests, her friends. It was a little alarming, because she had the strongest feeling of being explored, weighed, brought up for judgment.
    Presently Agnes Fane was talking of Tanis.
    “She has been very glad to meet you. I am pleased that you were able to come down. It seemed such a good opportunity as the Maxwells and Petra were already coming, and of course Carey Desborough—but we hardly count him as a visitor. He is the son of a very old friend, and we hope he and Tanis will be announcing their engagement very soon. I don’t know if Tanis told you, but there is really no reason why there should be any secret about it.”
    Laura’s colour rose and failed. She had the sudden sickening sense of just what a trap she had walked into. No wonder her reluctance had warned her not to come. Whatever happened now between her and Carey was going to look like a repetition of the old story—And that’s how Tanis meant it to look.
    Lilian Ferrers had taken Oliver from Agnes Fane. Laura saw herself being pushed on to a lighted stage where she was to re-enact her mother’s part. Whatever happened, Agnes Fane wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t Tanis who had been outwitted and betrayed. The realization was the