Kind Are Her Answers Read Free Page B

off again; how lucky men were to have no nerves!
    She put on the light, and bent for her quilted green satin slippers.

CHAPTER 2
    O N THURSDAY MORNINGS, AS near twelve o’clock as possible—for she liked regularity—Kit used to visit Miss Heath. He noted the day with a certain pleasure; calling on Miss Heath was rather like re-entering one’s childhood as a grown-up visitor. Miss Heath, her maid, Pedlow, and her cook, lived in six of the twenty-six rooms of Laurel Dene. It was a smallish Victorian-Gothic castle, walled away at the end of a cul-de-sac in what had been, sixty years before, the best part of the town. Now the Keble-ish houses on each side of the road had all been turned into offices or maisonettes; but behind the wrought-iron gates and spiked brick wall of Laurel Dene nothing had altered much, except that little Amy Heath, with her fluffed fringe and button-boots and pinafore and round cheeks like a worshipping child in The Peep of Day, had grown into Miss Heath, a very deaf old lady with chronic heart trouble. Amy’s kind Nannie had died about thirty years before, and been rewarded with an up-pointing marble angel and “Blessed is that servant whom the Lord when he cometh”; but her place had been taken at once by Pedlow, the still-room maid, whose functions by now were almost exactly the same.
    Kit, as he turned into the mossy drive, thought how implacably hideous the grounds must have been in their youth, when the gravel and geraniums and lobelia were paint-fresh. Now the flower-beds held only lush tangled perennials, the month-high lawns were powdered with daisies, and the white paint was flaking from the conservatory and the garden seats. To-day, the leaves of the poplars were beginning to fall wetly in a mild damp wind and to settle, with faint sounds, in the clumps of Michaelmas daisies. There must be a gardener somewhere whose almost invisible efforts just kept the place from becoming a jungle; but one never saw him. Noticing the poplar leaves plastered moistly to the bonnet of his car, Kit had the year’s first feeling of autumn, and said to himself, “Of course, she’ll never go through the winter.”
    The thought made him look about, as he got out of the car, with a keener, regretful appreciation. The Virginia creeper, turning fìg-purple and red, dropped its swinging beards over the windows and dripped from the pointed arches of the porch; in the middle of the lawn a wagtail was perched on a solitary croquet-hoop which decades had reduced to a thread of rust. He wondered what the place would be like next summer; more offices, he supposed, or a dreary private hotel.
    He tugged at the brass bell-pull, whose pattern had been smoothed by palms and fingers to a, soft ripple like ebb-tide sands; and thought about conversation, which was important. Ten years ago, Kit’s predecessor had explained to Pedlow that Miss Heath was not to be worried, and Pedlow had taken it to heart and remembered it every morning when she read aloud from the Times. Every new visitor had to be told, under the stuffed alligator in the hall, that Miss Heath had not heard about Hitler, and had better not know that there were any Communists in England because some one had told her about Russia and it had upset her. All this was easy, but the Royal Family was tricky going, because Miss Heath was devoted to royalty and supposed the Duke of Windsor to be still on the throne. The Abdication would have upset her terribly, so Pedlow had never mentioned it. There were several large photographs of the Duke in various uniforms as Prince of Wales: Miss Heath always referred to him as The Dear Boy. Once she had complimented Kit on having hair of the same colour (it was several shades fairer, but her sight and memory were both growing dim) and he had decided that this was probably her chief reason for liking him.
    Pedlow opened the door. She was a subterraneous-looking creature with a cachetic skin, and moved with faint crepitations