I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes Read Free Book Online

before he went back to the university in Prague.”
    There was a deep silence: everyone waited for someone else to speak. Kate looked at Sylvia, expecting her to take control of the conversation. But Sylvia was sitting quite still, scarcely listening. She had pushed aside her dessert plate, the peach lying in golden quarters. Then she said slowly, “I’m afraid we’re boring Kate and Lieutenant Turner.” She looked around the table as if she were ready to rise. But Hallis had helped himself to some grapes, and was peeling them with cautious skill.
    “Not at all,” Kate said helpfully. “What did this Jan Brovic look like to be so attractive to everyone? Or was he very ugly? Sometimes ugly men are very attractive.”
    Miriam laughed. “My dear,” she said, “he was tall and dark. About twenty-five, I think, at that time. Grey eyes? Yes, grey eyes, even features—but strong, you know. Nothing effeminate about Jan. And he really had such an amiable smile. He was so dependably charming, as if he really meant what he said.”
    “And he had just the suspicion of a limp,” Amy added. “He had been badly wounded in the leg. That made him most romantic.”
    Kate was looking at Sylvia again. At the station...
    “Yes,” said Clark, “heroes who get their jaws shot off never seem so romantic somehow.”
    Bob Turner had been covertly watching Sylvia for most of the evening. But now he looked sharply at her as he remembered the station and the tall man, dark-haired, who had limped as he walked towards Sylvia. But why hadn’t she said she had seen him? Miriam had given her the cue. Except, of course, she might have decided that Brovic had better be ignored and couldn’t quite admit it. “He sounds like a man who has put himself in a difficult situation. Why did he come back here anyway?” Turner said quickly, trying to draw the others’ attention in his direction, to turn the conversation eventually away from Brovic. “I suppose the Czech government has its own reasons.”
    “Why else would he be allowed to come?” Clark asked moodily.
    “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt,” Hallis said, and chose a grape with maddening deliberation. Then he looked back at Sylvia again. She hasn’t said one word about Brovic, he thought, and yet she had known him as much as Miriam or Amy Clark. How very interesting...
    “I don’t see what harm he could do, anyway,” Miriam said with a shrug of her thin shoulders. “Perhaps his arrival is a sign that the Czechs really want to be friends again. It’s a gesture of goodwill, that’s what it is.”
    Clark smothered a weary sigh. Bob Turner restrained himself.
    Hallis was looking up at the ceiling. Brovic, he remembered, had been a constant visitor to this house at first, and then—yes, there had been a sudden break in his visits. A few months later, he had left Washington. And Pleydell had never mentioned his name since. Nor Sylvia. “How stupid of me,” Hallis said, “I never thought of that. It’s an interesting possibility.” He finished the last grape.
    Sylvia rose abruptly.
    Miriam Hugenberg beamed with pleasure as she prepared to follow her. “Oh, I have occasional flashes of brilliance, darling,” she told Hallis.
    “Indeed you have,” Stewart Hallis said, looking at the diamond and sapphire necklace around the heavily powdered throat. He rose and bowed.
    “Well,” he said to the other two men as they sat down again, “I suppose we ought to talk about something we can agree on. It will be easier, anyway, now that the ladies aren’t present.” He glanced at Turner. “Surely there is something we could agree on?” he added humorously.
    “What about brandy and cigars?” Clark asked and won a small laugh all around.
    “Tell me,” Hallis said to Turner, his voice pleasant, his eyes serious, “did I hear Sylvia mention you were an engineer before you entered the Army? Where were you? M.I.T.?”
    “No. At Case.” And, somehow, the conversation