Enchanted Spring by Peggy Gaddis Read Free Book Online Page B

nightgown. And to cry herself to sleep, even while the sturdy common-sense of her, long submerged but very slowly struggling to the surface now, tried to scold her out of such idiotic behavior.

Seven
    SHE LOOKED at the small travelling clock on the dresser. Half-past seven. A scandalous hour to awaken, she told herself, and snuggled back under the covers, sinking drowsily into sleep. Suddenly she awakened with a little jerk. Her father! The nurse! Mary Somebody. Breakfast! She was quite sure the nurse wouldn’t get breakfast; and she herself knew so little about it —
    She set her teeth hard and forced herself out of bed. The chill air of the room struck through the wisp of chiffon and her teeth were chattering long before she’d managed to get into a pleated sports skirt and draw on a warm, comfortable cardigan jacket.
    She went out into the corridor. There was not a sound in the house. She went quietly downstairs, anxious that her father should sleep as long as possible, and found her way to the kitchen. She stood there for a moment, appalled. Hitherto her experience with kitchens had been brief; but she knew them vaguely as white-tiled places where there were electric ranges and electric ice-boxes. This one had an ancient wood-range propped up on two bricks beneath each leg. There was a battered kitchen table covered with a worn oil cloth. And there was a small pantry where she found food supplies.
    Three-quarters of an hour later, with a smudge on her nose, her hair tumbled about her face, tears running from smoke-rimmed eyes, she had a sullen smoulder in the stove and the kitchen was thick with smoke. She was halfway between tears of rage and hysteria when she heard a footstep on the back porch and the door swung open to admit Joel Hunter.
    “Good Lord, what’s up?” he demanded. Then he added with a gleam of humor that made her yearn with all her heart to throw a stick of wood at him, “Trying to burn down the house?”
    Carey straightened and thrust back a fallen curl with the back of a sooty hand, adding a smudge across her brow to the one she already wore on her nose.
    “The general idea was that I might build a fire and cook breakfast,” she told him icily. “But I don’t seem to be getting ahead very fast.”
    “Here, let me,” Joel said briskly. “These stoves are contrary brutes. You have to know just when to pamper them and just when to kick the living daylights out of them.”
    “At the moment, I’d thoroughly enjoy jumping on the thing with an axe,” Carey admitted.
    “I know — I’ve felt the same way,” answered Joel, with a cheerful grin as he twisted a wad of paper into the now empty grate of the stove, scattered a handful of pine-splinters expertly in place and then dropped, with a deftness that won her respect, several sizable sticks of wood above them. She watched, wide-eyed, while a match sent a tiny flame licking eagerly at the paper, igniting the splinters and finally clasping the sticks of wood so that in a few minutes the fire was burning, roaring briskly.
    “It’s sheer magic,” Carey told Joel simply.
    “There’s a smudge on your nose,” he told her, his eyes twinkling a little, though his voice was grave. “And your hair’s all tumbled, and there’s another smudge on your forehead. But in spite of all that you’re still the prettiest girl I ever saw.”
    There was, to her embarrassment, something in his eyes that made her heart give a little startled jerk. Which was pretty crazy, considering that he was a man she scarcely knew and one whose world was far removed from hers. For a moment they looked straight at each other and something of her bewilderment and uneasiness registered in her eyes. Joel’s mouth thinned a little and his eyes chilled.
    “But don’t be frightened,” he said, and now his voice was cool. “I assure you I’m a very level-headed guy and there’s not a chance in the world that I’ll forget you’re Miss Winslow, of Park Avenue, while