Through The Wall by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online Page A

spread it with home-made marmalade before she put her thought into words.
    “It doesn’t do any good to talk about it. They will be coming here next week.”
    Cassy Remington looked up from a tiny sip.
    “Rather amusing, don’t you think? Perhaps we shall like them very much. Young people make a place lively. We shan’t be living together. They needn’t interfere with us.”
    Mrs. Brand said heavily,
    “Very simple, I suppose, Cassy. Mr. Ashton seems to think so, and so do you. We keep to this side of the house, lock the connecting doors, and settle down as neighbours. And all the furniture has been left to her. I have a few things of my own, but you have nothing. She can take the bed you sleep on and all the other things. She can take the carpet from the floor and leave you with the bare boards.”
    Cassy darted one of those sideways glances.
    “But she wouldn’t.”
    “Probably not. What matters is that Martin should have left it in her power to do so. Then there is Eliza Cotton. Is she to continue to cook for us or for them? Mr. Ashton informs me that she is actually now in the service of Marian Brand. If she wishes to remain with us, she will have to give her notice.”
    “She won’t like the old kitchen,” said Cassy brightly. “You see—she’ll stay with us. An electric stove is what she’s always said she didn’t hold with. She won’t go and leave all the things she’s accustomed to.”
    “That remains to be seen.”
    “And there’s Mactavish—she’d never leave Mactavish.”
    Florence Brand allowed her eyes to rest for a moment upon his magnificent orange back.
    “Like everything else, he now belongs to Marian.”
    “He won’t stay on her side of the house if he doesn’t want to.”
    “He’ll stay whichever side Eliza stays.”
    “He won’t like not being the same side as Felix and Penny.”
    Florence Brand said in a gloomy voice,
    “Probably not. Thanks to Martin, there will be a great many things which none of us will like.”
    Cassy Remington had the place by the fire. She turned in her chair and bent to stroke the orange head.
    “Mactavish will do just what he chooses—he always does.”
    What he chose to do at this moment was to give her a look of dignified reproof, lick a paw, and remove the undesired caress. But by this time she had turned back again, her air brightly expectant.
    “Here comes Felix.”
    There was a clatter of feet on the stair, the door was jerked open and Felix Brand came in. A haggard young man in an orange sweater with a good deal of untidy black hair brushed carelessly from his brow. Within five minutes of leaving his room it would be falling into his eyes and being pushed back with the thrust of long nervous fingers, only to fall again and cut the line of a perpetual frown.
    Miss Cassy twittered.
    “My dear Felix, I’m afraid you won’t be pleased. There’s a letter from Mr. Ashton, and one from Marian Brand. She’s coming down, and the sister too—what’s her name—Ina Felton. What a pity she’s married. Someone told me she was pretty—I can’t think who it could have been. You might have fallen in love with her, and then the whole thing would have been settled.”
    She might have been talking in an empty room for all the notice anyone took.
    Felix came up to the table, bent his dark frowning gaze upon the letters, and read them—Mr. Ashton’s first, and then the few lines which had cost Marian Brand a couple of sleepless nights and a good deal of distressed thought, all to no purpose at all, because, whatever she had written, it would have encountered the same implacable resentment.
    Cassy Remington had stopped talking. She made little fidgeting movements with her hands. She and her sister both watched Felix, Florence Brand sitting quite still. They might not have been there for all the notice he took of them, until he suddenly looked up and said in a quiet, deadly voice,
    “She can’t come next week. You must write and say so. Helen is