Air Ticket by Susan Barrie Read Free Book Online Page A

fortnight. How would you like that?”
    “Very much,” she answered, but as she looked around her she thought, this is really all I want. This is lovely, and at least I have got him to myself up here!
    It was as if she felt a shadow falling across her—a shadow that warned her that in the crowded places he could never be so completely hers. But up here in the mountains there was no one with whom she had t o share him. No one who was alive...
    When they returned to Oberlaken Lucien’s housekeeper, with a welcoming smile on her face, greeted them. Caro was sorry that until she had done something about mastering the language of that part of the world they could have little actual speech, for Frau Bauer spoke no English. But the housekeeper did really welcome her.
    The cool gray-and-mauve lounge was full of flowers, exquisitely arranged. As she looked at them Caro realized at once that here was the handiwork of Olga Spiro. Upstairs she had her first moment of embarrassment when Frau Bauer led the way into the large main bedroom that had once been Dr. Andreas’s alone, but in which she would now sleep, also. The housekeeper tried to make her understand that the beds had been rearranged, the single one from his dressing room brought in and set up side by side with the one that was already there, while the dressing room now contained a kind of low divan bed that the doctor could still use if he wished.
    As Lucien had gone at once to Fraulein Neiger’s office, Caro and the housekeeper had no one to act as interpreter, but without very much difficulty Caro gathered what was being explained to her. She looked around the large bedroom and decided that it was more luxurious —much more luxurious than anything she had ever known before in her life. The carpet and the walls were a light oatmeal color, and the bed coverlets and the curtains were a very dark rose brocade. On the dressing table was a vase of deep pink roses that Caro recognized as part of Fraulein Spiro’s welcoming touch.
    In the adjoining dressing room the same color scheme prevailed, and the same air of luxury. On Lucien’s dressing table his brushes were set forth, and there was also a photograph in a large silver frame. Caro felt her eyes drawn to it at once, and something inside her seemed to become cold and still as she gazed into the pictured eyes. They were the loveliest eyes she had ever seen in her life, very wide open and candid and appealing, and the rest of the face was sheer perfection. It was framed in a lovely cloud of dark hair that curled softly on bare and shapely shoulders. At the bottom of the photograph, scrawled diagonally across a corner in round and rather childish feminine handwriting, were the words, “To Lucien from Ba.”
    The housekeeper was looking unmistakably uncomfortable. She repeated the same sentence several times, and at last Caro gathered the gist of it.
    “Fraulein Spiro instructed me to leave the photograph where it was.”
    “Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” Caro exclaimed, smiling reassuringly at the housekeeper. She realized that Fraulein Spiro might not have liked to take it upon herself to put away the photograph since Lucien himself had not done so. On the other hand —
    She was turning to reenter the bedroom when Lucien came in quickly. All in a moment he caught sight of the photograph, saw the obvious embarrassment of the housekeeper, the faint look of constraint on his wife’s face, and strode to the dressing table.
    “Oh!” he said. He slipped the photograph quickly into a drawer and then turned an inscrutable and unfamiliar face on Caro. “Everything all right?” he asked.
    “Perfectly all right,” she assured him.
    Caro walked up to her own dressing table and started to admire the roses in the vase.
    “They’re lovely, aren’t they? It was most kind of Fraulein Spiro to put herself to so much trouble, and she seems to have filled the house with flowers. These deep pink roses are favorites of