The Oldest Flame by Elisabeth Grace Foley Read Free Book Online Page A

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waiter and not be persecuted, whatever that means. What’s the
sheriff looking for, anyway?”
    Instead of answering him, Mrs. Meade came
straight to the point that had been troubling her. “Mark, what did
you mean the other day by saying it would take a ‘trial by fire’ to
prove yourself to Rose?”
    Mark looked startled. He stared for just a
second, and then a look a look of horrified understanding crept
into his wide brown eyes. “Is that what they think?”
    Mrs. Meade looked gravely and steadily into
his face. “What did you mean?”
    A rush of hot color had flooded Mark’s face,
up to his forehead. “I don’t know what I meant,” he said. “I
just—said it! I never thought—” He leaned against the wall as if
for support, his hand gripping nervously at the stair-rail. “Does
the sheriff really think that I did it?”
    “He—has his suspicions,” said Mrs. Meade as
gently as she could. A pitying, yet still puzzled frown rested on
her brow as she watched the boy.
    “Does Rose know?” he said almost in a
whisper.
    “No, I think not. I don’t believe Sheriff
Royal shared any of his ideas when he questioned her.”
    Mark came forward off the wall with sudden
anxious urgency. “Please don’t tell her, Mrs. Meade! Keep her from
knowing anything if you can help it. I’d—I’d be too ashamed
for her to even imagine that about me.”
    “Why?” demanded Mrs. Meade unexpectedly. “If
Rose is such a romantic girl, she might think it grand, you doing
it for her sake.”
    “No, no,” said Mark, shaking his head
distractedly. “I don’t want her to know. I couldn’t bear it. Can’t
you keep it from her? And then if the sheriff finds out something
else caused the fire, she’d never even have to know they ever
thought that—about me.”
    “Very well,” said Mrs. Meade, her kind heart
relenting a little before the boy’s distress. “I won’t say anything
to her.”
    Mark thanked her, stumbling over his words,
and then went up the staircase at the rate of three stairs a
stride, as if he were afraid someone was after him.
    Mrs. Meade went slowly down the stairs and
into the lobby, and walked out into the grounds of the hotel. She
walked along a smooth, well-kept path until she came to a bench by
the side of it, and sat down. How long ago it seemed since she had
sat on another bench in the Lansburys’ garden in such happiness and
contentment, and watched the sun beginning to lower over the
verdant valley. Two days—only two days ago.
    She considered what Mark had begged of her
just now. In a way, she could understand it. Leaving aside the
tragedy that had occurred that night, what had happened to him
during the fire was humiliating enough, especially compared to what
might have been. Mrs. Meade’s lips twitched with half-reluctant
humor as she pictured the opportunity for drama as Mark might have
pictured it. To have braved the perils of a burning house to carry
a fainting Rose to safety—to be the first one she saw when her eyes
opened; to care for her and comfort her—and perhaps to open her
eyes to the devotion she had scorned, the devotion of a young man
who would go through flames to save her…
    Instead, he had arrived late on the scene,
had failed to save Miss Parrish, had failed even to find Rose, and
in the end he had been the one to be unceremoniously packed out of
the burning house over his rival’s shoulder—insult added to injury.
Perhaps the sting would be worse if Rose were to think he had
planned it himself and still had everything go so awfully awry.
    But there was still something wrong with this
image…
    Mrs. Meade suddenly wondered why Mrs.
Lansbury had said “It was my responsibility.” Had she known
about some plan of her husband’s that endangered her guests? Or was
she blaming herself for having taken her son’s unhappy romance too
lightly?
    Mrs. Meade did not put much stock in Andrew
Royal’s suggestion that Mark had conspired with his father. Mark
was far too