Free The Chinese Shawl by Patricia Wentworth Page B

anyone?”
    “You tell Miss Fane that we are not engaged.”
    “Really?”
    “And that we have no intention of being engaged.”
    “Do I?”
    “And that we are, in fact, nothing but very good friends.”
    “Are we?” Her eyes blazed suddenly with green fire. “Is that all?”
    “I think so. I should like you to do it at once. We are all in a false position.”
    Tanis straightened up.
    “You mean that Laura is in a false position. That is what you mean, isn’t it?”
    “I said all of us.”
    “But you meant Laura. And of course, my dear, how right!” Her face lit up suddenly with a smile which had no enchantment this time, but a kind of vivid mockery. “How completely, entirely, delightfully right! Laura is for it—she is the vamp who has separated two loving hearts! It’s a marvellous situation, isn’t it? And won’t the aunts just lap it up! It should go down particularly well with Aunt Agnes, you know. ‘Be thou chaste as ice and pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.’ That’s what I learned at my school of dramatic art. And how true! In other words, darling Laura’s name is going to be mud. And she won’t even have had her fun first—or will she?”
    The dark colour rushed into Carey’s face. He stood rigidly still for a moment, and then put his hands down into his pockets. His eyes stared at her with a kind of raging contempt. There was a furious tension between them. He said,
    “You’ll go too far some day.”
    Tanis went on smiling.
    “Meaning that you’d like to murder me?”
    “It would be a pleasure.”
    The words had a quiet edge to them. They got under Tanis’s skin. Anger, passion, jealous rage, were so much incense at the shrine of her vanity. Contempt pricked her. Her smile went rigid. Her eyes stared.
    He swung round and went to the door, but with his hand on it he turned again and came back.
    “Look here, Tanis, what’s the good of all this? Losing our tempers and having a slanging match doesn’t get us anywhere. We’ve had some good times together, haven’t we? And you don’t want to marry me any more than I want to marry you, so what’s the use of stirring up trouble?”
    Tanis still had that queer fixed look. It came to him that there was something familiar about it— familiar, and rather horrible. He had seen a cat look like that, watching a bird that had got away. Something about the rigid pose and slitted eyes brought the likeness too vividly to mind for comfort.
    She said quite slowly and clearly, “You have a nerve, Carey, haven’t you—even if you’ve lost it for flying?”
    Her voice stopped, and everything stopped with it. There was a moment of deadly silence before he said,
    “Thank you, Tanis, I think that’s about enough. Don’t you?”
    This time he went out of the room and shut the door.
    chapter 13
    When all the events of that evening were raked over and sifted out, there was to be a curious changing of values. Some things that had appeared important at the time just slipped away and were lost. Some which had hardly been noticed came under a magnifying glass. A few things remained as they had seemed. It mattered to no one that Laura and Carey had kissed behind the curtains, because no one but themselves was ever to know of it. The fact that the door between Tanis’s sitting-room and the ground-floor room of the octagon tower had been carelessly closed by the maid who had been in to draw the curtains was to assume a terrible importance. The bit of gossip which Petra North brought hot-foot to Laura when she was dressing for dinner maintained its significance.
    There had been some music. Tanis had sung. She had a lovely limpid voice worthy of better music than the dance tunes which she sighed or crooned to her own flashing accompaniment. It was all very clever, very finished, very modern.
    Miss Fane looked across the room and said in her deep-toned voice, “That’s enough of that horrible stuff. Sing something civilized for a change.”