Free To Journey Together by Mary Burchell Page A

scrupulous.
    She promised herself a visit after lunch, but then Rudi was resting, on the doctor's orders, and so it was late afternoon before Elinor finally went to make enquiries and express her sympathy.
    He had evidently not long woken up, because he gave her a lazy, singularly sweet smile that made her heart beat unusually quickly, and said with rather less than his customary alertness and vitality, "Come in, Liebling"—which even Elinor knew meant nothing more nor less than "darling". "I thought you were not coming to see me at all. Everyone else seems to have been torn with anxiety about my state of health, but you very properly dismissed my sprained knee as a minor matter. Is that it?"
    "No, of course not." She stood smiling down at him, as though she could not help smiling when she looked at him. "I had some work to do and "
    "Work—work!" he mocked. "Does that always come first with you? Are your poor friends nowhere?"
    "Don't exaggerate," Elinor told him equably, refusing to take his reproaches seriously. "Of course I found out from Ilsa at breakfast how you were. And, judging from the number of people who seemed to want to commiserate with you, I should think it was just as well that one person at least put off the visit until the afternoon."
    "But did it have to be the one person I most wanted to see?" countered Rudi, his fine dark eyes sparkling with reproachful amusement.
    "I suppose you would have kept that nice little speech for whoever came last," Elinor retorted. But she coloured a trifle, in spite of herself, and hastily changed the subject by enquiring how he was feeling.
    "Wonderful, since you have come!" he told her. "And I hear you were also inordinately kind to my dear sister when she most needed it last night."
    "I hardly did anything," Elinor assured him, "except make a little fuss of her and see she had a hot drink and let her talk a bit. She had had a mild shock, you know, and didn't want to be alone. I
     
    know—I have two younger sisters who get like that when anything goes wrong."
    "And younger brothers too?" he wanted to know, with a smile.
    "Well, my younger brother is the most self-sufficient of us all. He doesn't often need anyone to whom to pour out his heart," Elinor explained, recalling Henry with a smile. "My elder brother does, though. He's rather inclined to fall in and out of love at the moment. I usually hear of the advent of each new divinity—and sometimes a little about her departure too."
    Rudi laughed aloud at this, which made Elinor laugh too.
    "I almost wish you were my sister," he said. "Except that it's nicer to have you someone else's sister."
    She refused to take up the implication of that. Instead, she said lightly, "Would you tell me about your falling in and out of love, if I were your sister, then?"
    "I might. Except that I don't often do it." "No?"
    Perhaps she looked faintly sceptical, because he said, "Does that surprise you?"
    "A little. You look the romantic kind who might," Elinor told him candidly. "If I may say so," she added demurely.
    "Indeed you may say so." He laughed again, rather delightedly. "You are enchanting when you say these things. But let me convey a hint of cynical wisdom to you, mein liebes Kind. The people who look romantic are nearly always the most hard-headed , hard-hearted creatures on God's earth."
    She looked at him consideringly, and, for a moment, her clear grey eyes showed that she was weighing him up in real earnest.
    "Are you hard-headed and head-hearted, Rudi?" she asked, with such a calm assumption that he would tell her the truth that, for the space of a few seconds, his laughing gaze wavered.
     
    "Do I answer that in all seriousness?" he wanted to know.
    "There is no point in answering it any other way," Elinor told him. "Since you yourself brought it up, that is. You were going to impart some cynical wisdom to me, you remember."
    "You little wretch, you are laughing at me!" "No. Or only a bit. But you are hedging now, and