Free Friends and Lovers by Helen MacInnes

four. My hero is caught in the rapids.
    He’s almost killed. And I have a new idea for the title. Perils of the Amazon. How do you like that?”
    “What was the first one, again?”
    “First it was Smugglers of the Orinoco, and then I thought of Dwellers of the Zambezi, and then–-”
    ” It is the same story, isn’t it?”
    Betty looked at Penny in surprise as they entered the house.
    “Why, of course!”
    “Versatile …” Penny said. She restrained herself until they had entered the dining-room, and then she could pretend to be smiling to every one round the table.
    “Betty and I were discussing titles. I say, Betty, why don’t you just list all the titles, and that would be a story in itself? You could call it Variations on a Theme.”
    “Sh!” her mother said warningly, and inclined her head towards their waiting grandfather. Penny bowed her head as the others were doing, but her eyes were not closed, and she studied her mother’s face as it registered thankfulness. It was just as Penny had thought when she had first entered the dining-room: her mother had been crying. She remembered, then, that there had been no reproach for being late for supper. She looked quickly towards her grandfather. He had finished saying Grace, and he was now admitting nothing beyond the excellence of the food.
    Penny was very subdued and very polite for the rest of the evening.
    *I wonder if Penelope is catching something,” Mrs. Lorrimer confided to her father, as the girls at last went upstairs to bed, and she prepared to follow them.
    “Probably just thinking. It is a painful process for anyone. Good night, Mary. And don’t worry, my dear.”
    But Dr. MacLntyre, as he lifted his pipe from the ashtray and stretched his legs before the fire, which had been lit against the chilly night air, was puzzling over Penny, too. Why had she paid that special visit to him this evening? London ostensibly. But David Bosworth indirectly? Stuff and nonsense, he thought irritably. And then he tried to imagine how he had felt and thought and acted when he was nineteen. But those years were too far away.
    And it was only in moments like those he had experienced this afternoon—Bosworth’s energy, his revolt against the state of acceptance; Penny’s vitality and warmth—that he could have the fleeting sensation of remembering exact emotions in his own youth. As if each year dropped a thin veil over the preceding year, and as you got farther away from the years of youth the accumulation of veils became a thickness substantial enough to conceal and hide. Only in certain moments, when some memory stirred, was that thickness slit through. Suddenly, and only for a brief interval.
    “There I am,” you said, looking at youth. And then you looked at yourself and said, “No.” And you added, “There I was.” And so you let the slit in the veils close again, and let your thoughts keep the even pace of your body. The veils, some bright, some sombre, fell together; and they lost all particular colour and merged into a gentle grey.
    Dr. MacLntyre looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece. You’ll never be a philosopher, he told himself: you were too happy with her.
    He smiled as he looked up at his wife. “Weren’t we, lass?” he said.
    Chapter Six.
    TALK FOR A GREY DAY.
    The Lodge at Loch Innish was a pugnacious place. You felt it could face any odds—Norsemen, raiding clans, winter storms, or the yearly invasion of its grouse moors. Even its recent embellishments of lawn and driveway, of tennis-court and rose-garden, could not alter its essential function. It was the guardian of the road which led from the deep, narrow sea loch to the scattered crofts and villages lying inland.
    When the mists hung over the loch, blotting out the sharp mountains falling steeply towards its dark waters, this feeling of watchful loneliness increased. With the security of foot-thick stone walls around you, and a solid roof over your head, you could even take