Free The Annam Jewel by Patricia Wentworth Page A

stood with his hands in his pockets, wondering why grown-up people lost their tempers so easily. It bored him frightfully. He wanted something to eat and a wash, but Uncle Matthew kept on talking at the top of his voice.
    â€œAnd you think it honest, honest to use your journey money for such a purpose?”
    Peter’s hand came out of his pocket with a handful of change in it. He put the little pile of silver and coppers on the edge of the table, and glared back at Matthew Waring.
    â€œI didn’t!” he said furiously.
    â€œYou didn’t what? What’s this? God bless my soul, what’s this?”
    Peter explained, shortly, gruffly, angrily.
    Matthew Waring looked at him for a moment in silence. Then he said:
    â€œWell, well …” And after a pause, “You say you found the little girl a home?”
    Peter nodded. His hands were in his pockets again. There was another pause. Peter was so frightfully empty that he couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be empty. Then Matthew Waring said suddenly:
    â€œWhen did you last have something to eat?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” said Peter. “There was a banana this morning, but I don’t know if you count a banana.”
    â€œOh, go away and get some food!” said Mr. Waring loudly and explosively.

CHAPTER IX
    During the next five years Peter saw very little of Rose Ellen. Mrs. Mortimer adopted her formally, and she had no wish to encourage too much intimacy with a boy whose ultimate career in life was likely to be bounded by the walls of a country solicitor’s office; Rose Ellen would be her heiress; also she was jealous of Peter’s place in Rose Ellen’s affections. Rose Ellen did not speak of Peter. She loved Mrs. Mortimer, and throve like a plant in a sunny place, but she never forgot. She had one of those rare natures which have no capacity for forgetting. Once in each holidays Peter came, stayed a day and a night, and was gone again. As the children began to grow up, Mrs. Mortimer regarded even this limited intercourse with disfavour. She made plans for taking Rose Ellen abroad: Switzerland at Christmas; the Riviera in spring; Norway in summer. She thought it would be quite possible to be out of Peter’s reach during the holidays.
    When Peter was seventeen he went to spend a fortnight of the summer holidays with the Coverdales. He met Sylvia Coverdale in Ledlington, where she was staying with an elderly cousin. He met her in very romantic circumstances which combined a bicycle accident, a car which was grossly exceeding the speed limit, a scream from Sylvia who thought her last hour had come, and a really good exhibition of presence of mind and dexterity on the part of Peter.
    Sylvia was eighteen, distractingly pretty, and an arrant flirt. She told Peter he had saved her life. She said saving a person’s life was a Link, wasn’t it? Didn’t Peter think it was a Link? Peter thought a good deal, but he didn’t say very much. Sylvia rather threw him off his balance. He escorted her to the cousin’s door, and went for a ten-mile walk, in the course of which he decided that he would become a millionaire as rapidly as possible, marry Sylvia, and give her the Annam Jewel on their wedding day.
    Sylvia sat down and wrote a romantic and illegible account of the adventure to her father. The result (i) of the romance, and (ii) of the illegibility, was that Peter was invited to stay at Sunnings. This, perhaps, needs explanation.
    The romance affected the matter because Sylvia had recently become engaged to a most undesirable and impecunious young poet of the name of Cyril Marling, and her parent, who detested poets in general, and Cyril in particular, entertained a hope that peter might distract his daughter’s mind.
    The illegibility had this bearing upon the situation, that Mr. Coverdale received the impression that Peter’s surname was Wareham. A Waring would never have been