Free Across the Counter by Mary Burchell

care to stay here? I sometimes take someone for q limited time. If I like them,” she added with candor.
    “Oh, Mrs. Falloden, I’d love it! Do you really mean it?” exclaimed Katherine.
    “If you like, the room I have to offer and find my terms satisfactory,” Mrs. Falloden said, smiling.,
    “I’m sure they’re satisfactory and that the room is lovely,” declared Katherine, convinced that it would be worth almost anything to exchange her present quarters for the charming atmosphere of the Falloden home.
    But Mrs. Falloden laughed and said that was no way to discuss business and that Katherine had better see the room first, as it was not very big.
    In fact, it was quite small. Probably not all that much bigger than the room she had at the Bellevue. But in charm and comfort it was palatial by comparison.
    Both the Fallodens seemed pleased and touched by her enthusiasm. And before she left to catch her bus back into town Katherine had come to mutually satisfactory terms with Mrs. Falloden and went away hugging the pleasant knowledge that she was to change her quarters the very next day.
    It was still not very late when she arrived back at her hotel and she decided to telephone her mother. With the pattern of life becoming so much more pleasant, even the tragedy of losing Malcolm seemed manageable, if no less agonizing. She thought she could now speak to her mother without betraying to her loving and experienced ears that something was wrong.
    The delighted surprise in her mother’s voice was heartwarming. And when Katherine explained that she was speaking not from London but from Morringham, she heard her mother call, “Arthur, it’s Katherine—and she’s in Morringham.” And almost immediately her father came to the telephone.
    He was a busy country doctor with a scattered practice, and more often than not he was not available when Katherine made her brief calls from London. But he was equally delighted to have a word with her on this occasion and wanted to know how soon they would be seeing her.
    “I’ll come for all of Sunday, father,” Katherine promised.
    “Not on Saturday? I thought Kendales closed on Saturday afternoons.”
    “They do. But they have a ball on Saturday night and I’m going.”
    She heard her father say, “The child says she’s going to a ball on Saturday. I didn’t know they had balls in Morringham.” Then to Katherine, “Your mother says what ball and who is taking you?”
    “It’s the store’s annual ball,” Katherine explained. “And ... well, Paul Kendale is taking me.”
    “You don’t say!” Even her father sounded impressed, in a parental sort of way.
    And then her mother took the receiver again and said, “Darling, how exciting! I didn’t know you even knew the Kendales.”
    “Well, I met Paul Kendale in the course of business — and he asked me.”
    “Very sensible of him,” commented her mother, who had a proper pride in her children, if rather few illusions about them. “Have you met his sister yet?”
    “No,” said Katherine, suddenly unable to add anything to that.
    “Well, I suppose you will at the ball. She has just become engaged. There was a photograph of her in today’s Morringham Mirror —such a pretty girl. The fellow she’s marrying is very good-looking too. A t iny bit of the fortune hunter about him, I thought. But it’s difficult to tell from newspaper photographs.” Katherine said it was. Then she asked hastily about her elder brother, Martin, who was junior house surgeon at the hospital in Corham, and about Gwendoline, who was in her first year of training as a nurse there. At this point a lot of deep breathing and a suppressed giggle told her that the twins, Charles and Charlotte, were listening in on the telephone extension upstairs.
    She heard her mother say, “Put down that receiver and go back to bed at once! You children know perfectly well you’re not supposed to listen to other people’s conversation.”
    “Oh, mother,