Linnet replaced the receiver. She crossed back to Joanna.
‘That’s my oldest friend, Jacqueline de Bellefort. We were together at a convent in Paris. She’s had the most terrible bad luck. Her father was a French Count, her mother was American–a Southerner. The father went off with some woman, and her mother lost all her money in the Wall Street crash. Jackie was left absolutely broke. I don’t know how she’s managed to get along the last two years.’
Joanna was polishing her deep-blood-coloured nails with her friend’s nail pad. She leant back with her head on one side scrutinizing the effect.
‘Darling,’ she drawled, ‘won’t that be rather tiresome? If any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dressmaking business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do batik scarves.’
‘So, if I lost all my money, you’d drop me tomorrow?’
‘Yes, darling, I would. You can’t say I’m not honest about it! I only like successful people. And you’ll find that’s true of nearly everybody–only most people won’t admit it. They just say that really they can’t put up with Mary or Emily or Pamela any more! “Her troubles have made her so bitter and peculiar, poor dear!”’
‘How beastly you are, Joanna!’
‘I’m only on the make, like everyone else.’
‘I’m not on the make!’
‘For obvious reasons! You don’t have to be sordid when good-looking, middle-aged American trustees pay you over a vast allowance every quarter.’
‘And you’re wrong about Jacqueline,’ said Linnet. ‘She’s not a sponge. I’ve wanted to help her, but she won’t let me. She’s as proud as the devil.’
‘What’s she in such a hurry to see you for? I’ll bet she wants something! You just wait and see.’
‘She sounded excited about something,’ admitted Linnet. ‘Jackie always did get frightfully worked up over things. She once stuck a penknife into someone!’
‘Darling, how thrilling!’
‘A boy was teasing a dog. Jackie tried to get him to stop. He wouldn’t. She pulled him and shook him, but he was much stronger than she was, and at last she whipped out a penknife and plunged it right into him. There was the most awful row!’
‘I should think so. It sounds most uncomfortable!’
Linnet’s maid entered the room. With a murmured word of apology, she took down a dress from the wardrobe and went out of the room with it.
‘What’s the matter with Marie?’ asked Joanna. ‘She’s been crying.’
‘Poor thing! You know I told you she wanted to marry a man who has a job in Egypt. She didn’t know much about him, so I thought I’d better make sure he was all right. It turned out that he had a wife already–and three children.’
‘What a lot of enemies you must make, Linnet.’
‘Enemies?’ Linnet looked surprised.
Joanna nodded and helped herself to a cigarette.
‘Enemies, my sweet. You’re so devastatingly efficient. And you’re so frightfully good at doing the right thing.’
Linnet laughed.
‘Why, I haven’t got an enemy in the world.’
IV
Lord Windlesham sat under the cedar tree. His eyes rested on the graceful proportions of Wode Hall. There was nothing to mar its old-world beauty; the new buildings and additions were out of sight round the corner. It was a fair and peaceful sight bathed in the autumn sunshine. Nevertheless, as he gazed, it was no longer Wode Hall that Charles Windlesham saw. Instead, he seemed to see a more imposing Elizabethan mansion, a long sweep of park, a more bleak background…It was his own family seat, Charltonbury, and in the foreground stood a figure–a girl’s figure, with bright golden hair and an eager confident face…Linnet as mistress of Charltonbury!
He felt very hopeful. That refusal of hers had not been at all a definite refusal. It had been little more than a plea for time. Well, he could afford to wait a little…
How amazingly suitable the whole thing was! It was certainly advisable that he should marry money, but not such a matter of necessity that he could regard himself as forced to put his own feelings on one side. And he loved Linnet. He would have wanted to marry her even if she had been practically penniless, instead of one of the richest girls in England. Only, fortunately, she was one of the richest girls in England…
His mind played with attractive plans for the future. The Mastership of the Roxdale perhaps, the restoration of the west wing, no need to let the Scotch shooting…
Charles Windlesham dreamed in the sun.
V
It was four o’clock when the dilapidated little two-seater stopped with a sound of crunching gravel. A girl got out of it–a small slender creature with a mop of dark hair. She ran up the steps and tugged at the bell.
A few minutes later she was being ushered into the long stately drawing-room, and an ecclesiastical butler was saying with the proper mournful intonation: ‘Miss de Bellefort.’
‘Linnet!’
‘Jackie!’
Windlesham stood a little aside, watching sympathetically as this fiery little creature flung herself open-armed upon Linnet.
‘Lord Windlesham–Miss de Bellefort–my best friend.’
A pretty child, he thought–not really pretty but decidedly attractive, with her dark curly hair and her enormous eyes. He murmured a few tactful nothings and then managed unobtrusively to leave the two friends together.
Jacqueline pounced–in a fashion that Linnet remembered as being characteristic of her.
‘Windlesham? Windlesham? That’s the man the papers always say you’re going to marry! Are you, Linnet? Are you?’
Linnet murmured: ‘Perhaps.’
‘Darling–I’m so glad! He looks nice.’
‘Oh, don’t make up your mind about it–I haven’t made up my own mind yet.’
‘Of course not! Queens always proceed with due deliberation to the choosing of a consort!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jackie.’
‘But you are a queen, Linnet! You always were. Sa Majesté, la reine Linette. Linette la blonde! And I–I’m the Queen’s confidante! The trusted Maid of Honour.’
‘What nonsense you talk, Jackie darling! Where have you been all this time? You just disappear. And you never write.’
