Cause for Alarm Read Free

less than Barnton had paid and seemed relieved. I began to get worried and, I am afraid, irritable.
    Claire was amazingly good about it all; but I was in a mood to imagine things, and began to suspect that she was losing confidence in me. Foolish of me, no doubt. She, too, was worried; but not as much by my difficulties as by the effect they were having on me. The plain truth is that I was rapidly losing confidence in myself. Then we had a slight quarrel. In itself it was trivial, but other circumstances were to render it important.
    We were sitting, rather gloomily, over tea. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and she had left the hospital for an hour to hear the result of an interview with a Birmingham man who was in London for the day. The result was negative. The man from Birmingham had been very pleasant and had given me introductions to two firms from both of which I had already drawn blanks. She heard the news in silence.
    “Well,” I added bitterly and very childishly, “when do we get married? Or would you prefer to call it off?”
    “Don’t be a fool, Nicky.” She paused. “Anyway, I don’t see why all this should interfere with our plans. Just because things are a bit tiresome at the moment, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go ahead.” She paused again. “After all,” she went on lightly, “I’ve got a perfectly good job and they talk about giving me more money soon.”
    “That’s very nice, darling,” I snapped. “And what am I supposed to do? Sit in the furnished bed-sitting-room and darn your stockings?”
    It was rude and unpleasant enough, but it was only the beginning. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean; pompous things about a man having a certain substratum of “self-respect” to consider and the ignominy of living on a wife’s earnings, none of which bore the slightest relation to what she had meant.
    She sat tight-lipped and silent until I had finished. Then she said: “I didn’t think you could be such an ass.” With that she got up and walked out of the shop.
    Of course, we made it up that evening. But there was a reservation about the reconciliation of which we were both conscious. When I left that night, she put on her coat and walked with me a little way.
    “You know, Nicky,” she said after a while, “you’ve done a terrible lot of apologising to-night. I feel rather bad about it. I know very well it’s all my fault really. If I’d had a grain of imagination I’d have known that you’d got enough to worry about without having a confounded nitwit of a girl talking marriage at you to make it worse.”
    I stopped dead in my tracks. “What on earth are you getting at, Claire?”
    “Go on walking, darling, and I’ll tell you.” We went on. “You remember that engineering paper you left in the hall the other night?”
    “Yes, what about it?”
    “I had a look through it, Nicky. You’d marked an advertisementin the Appointments Vacant Section. Do you remember it?”
    “Yes, vaguely.”
    “Well …?”
    I spluttered. “Good heavens, Claire, you’re not suggesting …?”
    “Why not? It fits your qualifications exactly. It might have been designed specially for you.” And then, as I began to expostulate once more: “No, listen, Nicky. It would do you good.”
    I halted again. “Now you listen to
me
, sweet. There are some things which are fantastic and absurd, and this is one of them.”
    She laughed. “All right, but here”—she produced a piece of paper from her bag and thrust it into a pocket of my overcoat—“I tore it out in case you might want to change your mind. Good night, darling.”
    When at last I continued my walk to the station, I had completely forgotten about the piece of paper.
    A week went by. Those seven days were the most depressing I have ever spent. For the first six of them nothing at all happened. Then, on the morning of the seventh, I received a letter from a famous engineering firm in answer to an application of mine in reply to