Free Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart Page A

entered the room.
    I saw then why we had missed hearing the car. He must have walked some distance from the place where he had parked it. His hair, and the tweed of his jacket, were misted with raindrops. This was my first meeting with him since our strange encounter on the Roman Wall, and I had been half-dreading it; but I need not have worried. He greeted me with imperturbable friendliness, and the same unquestioning acceptance of my partnership in his affairs that I had seen in his sister. If my own greeting was a little uncertain, this went unnoticed in Lisa's exclamation. "Con! Is it raining?"
    "I think so, I hardly noticed. Yes, I believe it is."
    "You believe it is! Why, you're soaking 1 And no coat on, I suppose you left the car three streets away. Really, Con! Come to the fire, dear."
    I had to stop myself from staring at her in amazement. This was a totally different Lisa from the one I had known up to now. Gone was the silent, stodgy-looking watcher of the Cafe Kasbah, the single-minded juggernaut of my Westgate Road lodgings, the crisply efficient tutor of the last few days. This was the hen fussing over its chick, or the anxious shepherd with the weakling lamb . . . She had bustled across the room to meet him, had brushed the raindrops from his shoulders with her hands, and drawn him nearer to the fire, almost before the door was shut behind him. She pressed him into the room's best chair, which she had just vacated, then hurried (without so much as a by-your-leave to me) to make fresh tea for him. Con accepted the fuss without even appearing to notice it; he stood patiently while she fluttered round him, as a good child stands still while its mother fusses its clothes into order, took the chair she pointed him to, and the tea she had made for him. It was a totally new facet of Lisa, and an unexpected one. It also went, I thought, quite a long way towards completing the picture of Con that I had had in my own mind. He was, in his own way, as good a teacher as Lisa. It fell to him to give me some sort of picture of life at Whitescar when Annabel had been there, and to round out, in his own racy, vivid way, the two most important portraits, that of Matthew Winslow, and of the girl herself.
    I waited for him to mention the final quarrel, and the night of Annabel's flight. But when he did come to it he added very little to what I had already heard from Lisa. I asked no questions. Time enough when he knew me better. He would have to come to it sooner or later, since the point at which the young Annabel had walked out of her grandfather's life was, obviously, the point at which I came in. But I wondered, increasingly, what reasons he could give me for a 'lover's quarrel' severe enough to drive a girl to three thousand miles of flight, and years of silence.
    The explanation was, in fact, left to my last "lesson" with Lisa. This fell on the Thursday of the third week, and I had not been expecting her. When I opened the door and showed her into my room, I thought that something was ruffling her usually stolid calm, but she took off her gloves and coat with her customary deliberation, and sat down by the fire.
    "I didn't expect you," I said. "Has something happened?" She sent me a half-glance upwards, in which I thought I could read uneasiness, and even anger. "Julie's coming, that's what's happened. Some time next week."
    I sat on the table's edge, and reached for a cigarette. "Oh?"
    She said sourly: "You take it very calmly."
    "Well, you said you expected her some time during the summer."
    "Yes, but she's taking her holiday much earlier than we'd expected, and I've a feeling that the old man's asked her to come, and she's getting special leave. He doesn't say so; but I know she had originally planned to come in August... You see what it means?"
    I lit the cigarette deliberately, then pitched the dead match into the fire. (The gold lighter, with its betraying monogram, lay concealed at the bottom of a suitcase.) "I see