Free Dark Threat by Patricia Wentworth Page A

have retired.’
    Jerome Pilgrim kept his room that afternoon. When Judy came down to supper she found her feet halting and reluctant. The farther they took her from Penny, the more clearly did Lona Day’s words come echoing back in the empty spaces of her mind—‘Don’t leave her alone with him, my dear.’
    ‘Don’t leave her alone—’ But she was leaving Penny alone, and just along at the end of the passage was the door behind which Jerome Pilgrim sat in his big chair. She knew quite well by now just how he would look, sitting there, his head propped on his hand, staring into the fire. Suppose he really wasn’t sane. Suppose he was dangerous. Suppose—no, she couldn’t even suppose that he would hurt Penny. But— Her feet stopped of their own accord, and she found that she was turning round and going back. Frank hadn’t wanted her to come here—Frank had begged her not to come. And she had been obstinate about it.
    She had almost reached her own door, when the door at the end of the passage opened and Jerome came out in a dark suit, with the rubber-shod stick he used about the house. As she stood uncertain and a little afraid, he called out to her in a friendly manner,
    ‘Are you going down? Then we can go together.’
    Judy had a change of mood. Her fear of a moment ago seemed monstrous. She felt so much ashamed of it that she made her voice extra warm as she said,
    ‘Oh, how nice! Are you coming to supper?’
    She went to meet him, and kept pace with him along the corridor.
    ‘Lona’s furious,’ he said. ‘She’d like to lock me in and take the key. She’ll come down presently draped in sweet reproach. She’s marvellous at registering the emotions. She’s wasted as a nurse of course—she ought to be at Hollywood.’
    Judy said cautiously, ‘She’s attractive—’
    He nodded.
    ‘Oh, very. And a most excellent nurse—I owe her a lot. But one likes to escape once in a way, and if you must know, I’m dying to see Aunt Collie’s school friend. What is she like?’
    Judy looked over her shoulder and said, ‘Ssh! She’s got the room next mine.’
    He actually laughed.
    ‘Couple of conspirators—aren’t we? Is she a dragon?’
    They had begun to negotiate the stairs. Jerome had to take his time. Judy thought, ‘He’s quite easy with me now—I might have been here for years. He’d get used to seeing people—I’m sure he would. It can’t be right to keep him shut away. He’s friendly. You can feel it when he comes out of his hole.’ She said with a little laugh, ‘Oh, no, not a dragon at all—prim and Victorian, like the people in Aunt Cathy’s nineteenth-century books. I was brought up on them. She makes you feel like schoolroom tea.’ She paused, and added with a warmth that surprised herself, ‘She’s nice .’
    At supper Jerome actually talked. Miss Columba, delighted to see him, found herself a good deal embarrassed by the interest he displayed in the school-days which she was presumed to have shared. Judy, tickled, could not help admiring the dexterity displayed by Miss Silver.
    ‘To tell you the truth, Captain Pilgrim, those days seem now so very far away—quite like a dream, or something one has read about in a book. They do not, if you know what I mean, seem to be at all actual. Your aunt will, I am sure, bear me out. I could not myself give you the names of half a dozen of my contemporaries at school, yet I recall the personalities of many more, and am aware of the manner in which each of them affected me.’
    She had caught his attention. He said musingly, ‘Names are just a label. They’re nothing—like clothes, to be changed. Individuality is what counts. That goes on.’
    She gave him one of her really charming smiles.
    ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’
    His interest deepened. There was something in the look and the quality of the smile which enabled her to get away with about the most hackneyed quotation in the whole range of literature. He