The Sword of Fate by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online Page B

cantered back remained for the best part of the ride near us but out of earshot. In consequence I was at least able to talk freely to Daphnis and stress the frightfully short time that I now should be in Alex.
    “I simply dare not meet you at a restaurant or a cake-shop,” she insisted. “Alex is such a small place, at least the part where girls like myself could go, and my parents would be certain to hear of it. I wonder, though, if I could manage to get down to the garden at night, in spite of Mother being at home. Her room is next to mine, but she goes to bed quite early. It would mean tiptoeing past her door on going down and coming back, but if I’m awfully careful I don’t think she’d hear me. I do want to see you again, Julian, and if you like I’ll chance it.”
    That put me between the devil and the deep sea. I wanted more than anything else in the world to have that stolen meeting, but it seemed a rotten business on my part to urge her to do something which might land her in serious disgrace.
    I had just made up my mind to tell her that she must not risk it when she said, with sudden decision: “That’s the only thing to do, and if I’m caught I’ll pretend that I’m walking in my sleep. I used to as a child and no one will be able to prove that I’m lying.”
    Once that was settled we had the meeting to look forward to and it put us both in a far happier frame of mind, so that for the rest of the ride both of us were full of joyous excited anticipation of the coming night.
    Yet once I had left her I became restless and nervy. In vain I tried to read or amuse myself in various other ways throughout the day, but I could think of nothing except Daphnis and my all-absorbing love for her.
    So far I had said nothing to her about marriage. Perhaps that was innate caution resulting from my numerous past affairs, in several of which I had had to exercise considerable skill to prevent myself being hooked by charming little gold-diggers who would have liked to establish a permanent claim on my handsome income; and I had no idea at all if Daphnis regarded me as a potential husband or not. Possibly she believed that her people would never consent to her marrying an Englishman and so had put the whole question right out of her mind. On the other hand, since she had been so jealously guarded, it was quite on the cards that, like an early-Victorian miss, she took it for granted that any man who said that he loved her and kissed her on the lips automatically wanted to marry her; but that there was no hurryabout going into details and that I should find a way to do so in due course.
    In any case, I had definitely made up my mind that I wanted to marry her and the sooner the better. I see no point in long engagements, particularly when there is a war on, so I intended to tell her that night that there was nothing whatever to be frightened of, and that I meant to come round on the following morning to call formally on her mother and father and ask her hand in marriage before I returned to Cairo.
    Had she been an English girl I might have been a little worried about my past, and the effect that its disclosure, which I could not have decently avoided, would have had upon her and my prospective parents-in-law. But I felt that I could produce the grim skeleton which I kept so carefully locked in my cupboard to Daphnis without fear when the first suitable opportunity offered, and it did not seem to me that I was bound to go into the matter at all with the parents of a girl who knew no English people, and with whom I had not the faintest intention of settling down in England to live.
    Apart from that I saw no reason why a father of any nationality should consider me as an unsuitable husband for his daughter. I was young, sound in wind and limb, and had no previous encumbrances, either wives, children, or troublesome ex-mistresses. I had a comfortable fortune, carefully invested, and when my elderly uncle, the old Major-General,