Hole and Corner Read Free Page B

read all the advertisements. The conductor was a nice young man with a merry eye. There were a lot of nice people in the world, but it was a pity that most of them had so little money. Some of the people who had a lot weren’t half so nice. Perhaps Mrs Huddleston would have been nicer if she had been poor and had to do things for herself instead of ordering other people about. Miss Maltby on the other hand was poor, and she was easily the nastiest person Shirley knew.
    The bus stopped with a jerk at Acland Road and Shirley jumped off.
    Revelston Crescent was the first turning on the right out of Acland Road. A newsboy stood there, thrusting out his papers at the passers-by. Shirley shook her head. She hadn’t any coppers to spare, but the poster news was free. She could amuse herself as she went along trying to piece the headlines together like a jigsaw puzzle. This boy’s poster was quite a new one, fresh and hot from the press. It said in big letters of staring black:
    â€œDeath of William Ambrose Merewether.”
    The name did not stir her memory in even the slightest degree. It meant nothing to her except that in a faint, uninterested way she linked it with the other poster she had seen, and supposed that William Ambrose Merewether was the Dead American Millionaire. That the death of this unknown person would affect her, her life, and her safety would have seemed an impossibility, yet at that very moment a train of events had been set in motion which were to change the whole course of her life and endanger all its hopes and prospects.
    She cast only one glance at the poster and ran as far as the fifth house of Revelston Crescent, where she pulled up, because Mrs Huddleston lived at No 15 and she certainly wouldn’t approve of a secretary who added to the misdemeanour of being late the solecism of running in a public street.
    As a matter of fact, the solecism had practically cancelled the misdemeanour. Shirley arrived only one minute late by the ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece. It was the most hideous clock in the world, and it was three minutes fast by Big Ben, so she wasn’t really late at all—only it wasn’t any use saying so.
    Mrs Huddleston lay on a rose-coloured couch by the fire with a piece of old Italian brocade drawn up to her waist and a bottle of smelling-salts in one long pale hand. She wore a trailing garment of sky-blue satin profusely trimmed with lace after the manner of a tea-gown of the nineties. In the nineties she had been a beauty of the Burne Jones type. It was her misfortune that she had been born too late to be painted by him or by Rossetti. She had had the long, full throat, the free contours, and the immense bush of hair which those artists regarded with idolatry. She had them still. The hair cascaded to her eyebrows in a sort of tangled fringe and hung upon her neck in an immense loose knot. It was still black, with no more than a thread or two of grey in it. Her really enormous eyes were as dark and languishing as they had been when she was twenty-five, but she had rather the look of something preserved very carefully under a glass case and belonging quite unmistakeably to a previous generation, like paper flowers or fruits modelled in wax. The diamonds in the brooch which flashed among her laces seemed more alive than she herself.
    Shirley closed the door behind her, Mrs Huddleston lifted the smelling-salts to her nose.
    â€œIt is past the half-hour, Miss Dale.”
    Shirley said nothing. She had had six months to discover that even Mrs Huddleston found it difficult to nag a secretary who didn’t say anything at all.
    The aggrieved lady took another sniff.
    â€œI suppose it is too much to expect punctuality, but if you could be here by the half-hour, Miss Dale—”
    Shirley smiled, still without speaking. She meant the smile to say, “I’m not sulky. Do come off it and be human!”—things like that.
    Mrs Huddleston