Before the Fact by Francis Iles Read Free Book Online Page A

suffered agonies of shyness, as she sat at the foot of her own dinner table; and to her horror found herself adopting to cover it a hard, artificial brightness. She knew that this manner paralyzed her less self-confident guests, and their paralysis in turn infected her; but she was quite unable to shake it off. She saw Johnnie watching her from the other end of the table with a whimsically lifted eyebrow. Johnnie, of course, was a born host from the very beginning.
    It took Lina several months to learn to be natural, and by that time her end had been accomplished.
    A certain Captain Melbeck, a distant connection of Johnnie’s, who had recently inherited an estate of nearly twelve thousand acres including a dozen farms, and had not the faintest idea what to do about it, quite thankfully undertook to pay Johnnie five hundred a year to do it for him.
    Lina, after some difficulty, succeeded in borrowing from her father enough capital to pay off Johnnie’s debts, dismissed two of her servants, and settled down to run Dellfield, as economically as possible, on a thousand a year.
    And Johnnie departed every morning, with resignation but with punctuality, on the twenty-mile run that separated him from his office on the Bradstowe estate.
    Lina watched him go with affectionate pride. Johnnie, in his new rôle as world’s worker, was completely reinstated as the perfection of mankind.
CHAPTER IV
    “In the country,” said Lina brightly, “one doesn’t choose one’s friends; one accepts gratefully those whom providence has put there.” She laughed, a little selfconsciously, as she always did when she thought she had said something rather smart in the presence of her brother-in-law.
    Cecil was stirring his coffee, and looking into the depths of the cup as if hopeful of learning the secrets of the universe in it. “I do think you are so right, Lina,” he said sadly.
    “Well, whom has providence been pleased to bestow on us this afternoon?” asked Joyce, very cool and smart in a white silk frock, and absurdly young for a mother of two children.
    Lina enumerated the guests who were coming to her tennis party that afternoon. “I’m afraid you’ll find them a terribly dull lot,” she apologized to Cecil.
    “It isn’t other people who are ever dull,” Cecil replied dreamily. “It’s we who are dull, when we find them so.”
    “Don’t hold your cup like that, darling,” adjured Joyce. “You’ll spill the coffee over your trousers.”
    Cecil looked in a pained way at his coffee cup and then at his white trousers, before adjusting the angle of the former.
    “You are so right, dear,” he murmured.
    Lina wished that Johnnie’s work did not take him away from home for lunch. She enjoyed having Cecil and Joyce to stay, and it was wonderful to have someone with whom she could rasp brains again, but undoubtedly Johnnie did lighten the atmosphere. Cecil was charming, but he was at times a little heavy.
    As soon as she reasonably could, Lina suggested that Cecil and Joyce should go out to the court and have a practice single, while she herself went upstairs to change. Cecil fell in with the suggestion at once, as he fell in with almost any suggestion that was made to him; and Joyce demurred only enough to make her acquiescence of value.
    Standing by the big, low window in her bedroom, Lina watched for a few minutes Joyce’s dark, fluffy head moving rapidly over the green of the court, and Cecil’s lanky form twisting into sudden and unexpected angles on the further side of the net. It was odd that Cecil should be so good at tennis. One would not have expected it. Joyce, who had been reckoned a really excellent player at Abbot Monckford, was only just good enough to give him a game. Lina herself was hopelessly outclassed by both of them.
    But Johnnie could give Cecil fifteen a game and beat him. Johnnie was almost first class.
    Lina finished her dressing, put on her rubber-soled shoes, and went downstairs. It was nearly