Free Red Stefan by Patricia Wentworth Page A

before.”
    Through her down-dropped eyelids Elizabeth was aware of Irina’s scrutiny. She smiled a faint, empty smile, hung her head, and twined her fingers in her skirt. It would be as well not to show more of her hands than she could help. They were roughened by work, but they were too small and fine for a peasant. She did not like Irina’s silence. She was more aware of it than of the conversation between Stephen and the others.
    Irina broke it at last.
    â€œAre your parents alive?”
    Elizabeth shook her head. Strangely and suddenly the question touched a hidden spring of pain. Her parents had died in the same year ten years ago when she was only fourteen. Such an old wound to hurt again in this keen way. No acting could have served her like the tears which came stinging to her eyes. Some of them brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks. She lifted a fold of her skirt and wiped them away.
    â€œThey are dead?” said Irina. “It is very foolish of you to cry. Old people are a burden to the State. It is we who are young who have to fight in the battle of World Revolution.” She turned to Stephen. “I am going now, and you can walk back with me. Anton and Anna will not be home just yet, so we can talk undisturbed.”
    â€œLook at that!” said old Masha in a scandalized whisper. “Not a week married, and she carries him off as bold as you please, and his wife stands there as limp as a bit of potato-peeling and lets her do it! Why, I’d have had my two hands full of her hair if it had been me! What’s the matter with her? Isn’t she right in the head?”
    Akulina shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œShe’s a poor creature, and the Lord knows why Stefan picked her. But that’s a man all over—so long as the girl’s his own picking, she’s all right for him.”
    Elizabeth sat down on the end of the bench. Under the twisted folds of her skirt her hands were clenched. Her anger surprised her. She tried to argue it down, but it remained. If she were really Stephen’s wife, she could not be angrier. It was a self-evident absurdity that she should be angry at all. She had no longer the slightest inclination to weep. Her eyes were dry and hot. She made her face as blank as possible and stared sullenly down into her lap.
    Stephen walked over the frozen snow with Irina. She lodged in the schoolmaster’s house, an arrangement which was the source of much watchful suspicion on the part of the schoolmaster’s wife, and of a mixture of self-conscious terror and vanity in the schoolmaster himself. That so beautiful a person as Irina, and one who was said to have the ear of influential Comrades in Moscow, should have her name linked with his, that Anna should make him jealous scenes about her, was both flattering and alarming.
    Irina began to talk about him at once.
    â€œAnton is becoming quite intolerable. Because I discuss things with him he seems to think that I am in love with him. And as for Anna, she’s so jealous that I should not be surprised if she became insane.”
    Stephen wondered if she was as cold-blooded as she sounded.
    â€œPerhaps it would be better not to make her jealous.”
    â€œJealousy is madness,” said Irina calmly. “I am not responsible for Anna’s fancies. I am glad that you are back, so that I may have someone rational to talk to.”
    â€œI do not think I shall be here for long,” said Stephen.
    â€œYou move about too much. Soon it will not be so easy to do that. There is to be an internal passport system. That is to get rid of the remnants of the proscribed classes, who have swarmed like parasites into the towns. Everyone will have to have papers, and it will not be so easy to get about.”
    â€œYes, I have heard that. It will be a very good thing,” said Stephen indifferently.
    Did she mean anything? Was it a warning? An internal passport system was going to make his work about