No Time For Love (Bantam Series No. 40) Read Free Page A

years, a doll which opened and shut its eyes, and in the book-case, beside the volumes she had acquired as she grew older, were the first books she had ever owned.
    “Not much to show for a life-time!” Larina told herself.
    Then as if the horror of what she had heard swept over her like a flood-tide, she moved to the window to stand looking out over the grey roofs and the back-yards of the houses behind them.
    “What can I do? What can I do about it?” Larina asked herself.
    Then almost as if the thought came like a life-line to a drowning man she remembered Elvin.
    She wondered as she thought of him why he had not come into her thoughts from the very moment Sir John had pronounced the death sentence.
    She supposed it must be because she had been shocked into a kind of numbness which had made it impossible for her to think of anything except the twenty-one days which were left to her.
    Elvin would have understood exactly what she was feeling; Elvin in his inimitable manner would have made everything seem different.
    They had talked of death the very first time they had met.
    It had been a day when Mrs. Milton had been very ill and Larina had known by the expression on Dr. Heinrich’s face that he was worried.
    “There is nothing you can do,” he said to Larina. “Go and sit in the garden, I will call you if she needs you.”
    Larina had known if she was called it would not be a case of her mother needing her, but because Dr. Heinrich thought she was dying.
    She had turned and gone blindly out into the garden of the Sanatorium.
    For the first time she did not see the brilliance of the flowers or the beauty of the snow-capped mountains which had never failed to make her heart leap whenever she looked at them.
    She moved out of sight of the buildings to a place among the pine-trees where there was a seat that had been specially put there for patients who could not walk far.
    It was very quiet. There was only the sound of the cascade pouring down the side of the mountain into the valley below and the buzz of the bees as they sucked the nectar from the mountain-plants that grew among the rocks.
    It was then, because she thought no-one could see her, that Larina had put her hands over her face and begun to cry.
    She must have cried for a long time before she heard a movement beside her, and a man’s voice said gently:
    “Are you crying for your mother?”
    Larina with tears still running down her cheeks had turned to see who was there.
    A man seated himself beside her and she saw that it was Elvin Farren, an American she had not spoken to before because he slept in a hut by himself in the gardens of the Sanatorium and never came to the Dining-Room for meals.
    “Mama is not dead,” Larina said quickly as if in answer to a question he had not put into words, “but I know that Dr. Heinrich thinks she may be dying!”
    She drew her handkerchief from her belt as she spoke and wiped the tears from her eyes almost fiercely. She was ashamed of having given way so completely.
    “You must go on hoping that she will recover,” Elvin Farren said.
    Larina did not speak for a moment, then she answered: “I am frightened, but then I suppose everyone is frightened of death.”
    “Perhaps for other people,” Elvin Farren replied, “but not for one’s self.”
    Larina looked at him and knew that he was very ill. He was extremely thin: there was something almost transparent about his skin and the tell-tale patches of bright colour on his cheek-bones were all too obvious.
    “You are not afraid?” she asked.
    He smiled at her and it seemed to transform his face. “No.”
    “Why not?”
    He looked away from her towards the panorama of mountains where the sun shining on the snows remaining after the winter was almost blinding.
    After a moment he said:
    “Do you want the true answer to your question, or the conventional one?”
    “I want the true answer,” Larina replied. “I am afraid of death because it must be so