Free Heads You Lose by Christianna Brand Page B

Gladys.” She looked out at the driving snow and said, with the careless good-nature of her kind: “Here, you’d better have my scarf. Wind it round your head and tuck it over your chest; you can let me have it back to-morrow—no hurry.” She stood in the doorway and called: “Good-night. God bless.”
    Pendock was silent on the walk home. In the hall he said to the girl: “Better leave the scarf here; I shall be seeing Miss le May to-morrow, I expect, or anyway I’ll arrange that she gets it back.”
    “Yes, sir. All right, sir. And thanks ever so much for seeing me home, sir.”
    Pendock was practically unaware that he had seen Gladys home; but he smiled at her in his kindly way and said, “Good-night, my child.”
    “… and that moonlight walk through the snow set the seal on the beautiful housemaid’s romance,’ thought Gladys joyfully.
    Fran and Venetia and Henry and James were playing Vingt-et-un. “Weren’t we fools to start this?” said Venetia, laughing. We shall go on all night. But we had to get the taste of Pippi out of our mouths.”
    “Where’s your grandmother?” said Pendock.
    “Here I am,” called Lady Hart; the writing bureau was out of sight in the short end of the L-shaped drawing room. “I’m struggling with a letter to the Income Tax people and I wish to be left severely alone. How do you spell preposterous?”
    “Come and play Vingt-et,” said Fran, holding out her hand to Pendock. She felt rather shy of him now that she had had a glimpse of his passion for her, and especially since her talk in the orchard with James.
    Venetia looked under the table. “Aziz; oh, you are there, darling! I thought he must have gone out when Pen opened the door.”
    Pendock stood beside Fran, holding her hand in his own warm grasp, and watched the game for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll play. I’ve still got an awful head. It’s,” he glanced at the clock, “eleven o’clock and I want to get some sleep to-night.”
    “Well, it’s a pity, darling, because we should have had to divide up a bit, and Henry could have given you some of his money. Look at him, he’s got so many matches that we’ve had to give him a lump sum of James’s lighter, and distribute them again.”
    “Trust a Jew,” said Venetia, laughing. “He always does it. It only shows that it’s quite right when they say that the Jews have all the money and people like Henry are responsible for the War and Mussolini and the measles epidemic and the common cold and everything else that ever goes wrong with the world…”
    “Well, I absolve him from responsibility for my headache,” said Pendock. “Did you ever hear anyone talk like that le May girl? Oh, and by the way, she lent Gladys her scarf, so will someone see that she gets it back to-morrow? She’s sure to be up here sometime. I’ve put it in the left-hand little drawer of the stand in the hall.”
    “I’ll take it down to the Cottage in the morning,” said James, indolently dealing out cards. “I ought to go and pay my respects to Trotty.”
    “Will you? Thanks very much. Well, I’m off to bed,” said Pendock, with his hand on the door handle. “Thank God we can all sleep a bit more easily to-night. Good-night, my children. Good-night, Lady Hart.”
    “Good-night,” called Lady Hart’s voice from around the corner. “Sleep well!” They could hear her pen, scratching away as she wrote.

Chapter 4
    P ENDOCK WAS DREAMING AGAIN; he saw the same dim tunnel stretching out before him, the woman standing at the end of it, out in the sunshine, and felt the same strange urge to see her face. He put his hand beneath her chin to lift her head, and there came again the thunderous din in the tunnel behind him; he swung round to see what had made it, and when he turned back again, the woman was gone. Hands reached out of the tunnel and caught him by the shoulders… a voice said urgently: “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
    He was awake and shivering, sick with