Wicked Angel by Taylor Caldwell Read Free Book Online

and pavement with pure light. Alice walked erectly, her shoulders squared, her steps long yet graceful, her pale hair blowing in the nimble wind. She had an air of surety, of integrity, and even of loveliness, thought Mark, surprised that he had never noticed these things before. He stood there, watching until she had turned the corner. Then he felt bereft, and the sun was less bright, the atmosphere less clear. Something clean and strong and womanly had gone from his sight, something without murk or hot exigence and disorder.
    Frowning, he went to his car. He looked at his watch. It was nearly five, time to go home. All at once, a huge repulsion came over him, without voice or name. He dreaded going home, dreaded his beautiful house, his polished rooms, his good dinner, his pretty wife, his handsome son, and even the fire which would be burning on the hearth.
    He remembered, then, that he had felt this emotion for a considerable time, without admitting or recognizing it, and it had begun when Alice had left his house “to be independent,” as Kathy had spitefully said. Something mysterious had gone when Alice had departed. “What the hell’s wrong with me?” he said aloud, as he started his car.

CHAPTER THREE
    The Saints owned a small but pleasant, even luxurious, “cabin” on a forest-covered bluff ten miles from their suburb.
    The acreage about the Saint’s suburban house was expansive enough, and the secluded and exclusive area was quiet, cool and beautiful enough to be regarded as “country” by the city dwellers. But Kathy, who had been born and brought up in a tiny, five-room house in the city, on a noisy and somewhat dirty poor street, had demanded “country” for her son, and “clean, fresh air, sometimes.” So the land, some ten acres from the bluff rearwards, had been bought, at considerable cost, and the cabin built. It was not truly a cabin, but Kathy, in her coy manner, called it so. It was built of thick, authentic logs with the bark still on them, and contained a large living room, full of expensive rustic furniture and ironware, the walls whitewashed and beamed, the big fireplace of fieldstone, the wide-planked floor darkly polished and strewn with handmade hooked rugs. Fake oil lamps stood on maple tables and hung from the walls, wired for electricity. The kitchen was almost as well appointed as the one in the house in the suburbs, with the same knotty-pine walls, and a planked floor gleaming with wax. There were three large bedrooms and two baths, the former rustically furnished with tester beds, hooked rugs and lamps and chests, the latter glittering with tile and chrome. An area of about half an acre was cultivated around the cabin, with flower beds filled with old-fashioned blossoms and carefully tended great maples and oaks bending over smooth grass, but beyond this area were authentic woods, aromatic with pine, carpeted with needles and leaves of many summers, dusky and secret, cool and shadowy, sweet with trailing arbutus and violets in the spring, strongly scented with more robust wild-flowers in the summer, and painted in brilliant colors in the autumn. It was a year-round “retreat,” to quote Kathy; the Saints frequently visited the cabin in the winter, for there was a pond a short distance away where Angelo could skate, and a low hill where he could use his sled, or the skis he had recently acquired. “A man” maintained the grounds and the cabin, and lived in a nearby village. When the Saints came in the summer, for four long weeks and every weekend and holiday, the current maid came with them, for rusticity could go just so far with Kathy. Sometimes she and Angelo would remain behind when Mark had to return to the City, and spend the dreaming summer hours together in the heavenly separation from the watchful husband and father.
    Mark would have preferred a place on the seashore, or where there were running streams full of fish, but Kathy was adamant. There must be no menace