The Karma of Love (Bantam Series No. 14) Read Free

her brother's voice replied.
    A door was opened and she saw Charles wearing only a shirt and trousers.
    “Good God, Orissa!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
    “I had to come, Charles,” Orissa answered. “She turned me out and I cannot get back into the house tonight.”
    There was no need for her to explain who “She” was.
    “Dammit!” Charles ejaculated. “This is too much! Why do you put up with it?”
    “What else can I do?”
    He saw she was shivering.
    “Come and sit by the fire,” he suggested. "You ought not to have come here.”
    “I have nowhere else to go,” Orissa answered simply.
    She crossed the bed-room as she spoke and sat down on the hearth-rug in front of the fire holding out her cold hands to the warm flames.
    “Do you mean ‘She’ really threw you out of the house?” Charles asked almost incredulously as he followed her across the room.
    “With some violence,” Orissa replied. “If my hair was not so thick I should have bruises on my head.”
    As she spoke there was a little smile on her lips. It was such a relief to be here with her brother that now everything which had happened seemed almost amusing rather than tragic.
    “Oh, God!” Charles exclaimed. “Why did the old man ever get himself mixed up with a woman like that?”
    “I have been asking myself the same question for eight years,” Orissa said. “When I think how lovely and gentle Mama was ...”
    She stopped in the middle of the sentence.
    After all this time it was still difficult to speak of her mother without feeling near to tears.
    “I know,” Charles said sympathetically, sitting down in an arm-chair beside the fire, “but you cannot go on like this.”
    “Next time it happens you may not be here,” Orissa replied.
    “You ought not to be here now,” Charles said. ‘ I hope no-one saw you arrive.”
    Orissa hesitated.
    She did not wish to tell him the truth because it might upset him. At the same time she never lied to her brother.
    “As a matter of fact there was ... someone on the ... first floor,” she answered, “a tall man with grey eyes.”
    “Hell!”
    Orissa looked at him and he said:
    “It could not be worse ! That must have been Meredith.”
    “I am ... sorry,” Orissa faltered. “Does it matter ... very much?”
    “It will not help things,” Charles answered.
    “Why not? Who is he?”
    “He is Major the Honourable Myron Meredith,” Charles informed her, “and I am in his black books already.”
    “Why?” Orissa enquired. “And even if he is a Major, why has he got such authority over you?”
    “Because he is not an ordinary Major,” Charles answered. “He has a land of roving commission. If you ask me, he is Secret Intelligence or something of the sort. Anyway, he is quite a big-wig in India.”
    “And why should you be in his black books?” Orissa enquired with an almost fierce note in her voice.
    “I have been in a spot of trouble already,” Charles admitted.
    “What sort of trouble?”
    “You are too inquisitive,” he replied, “but I do not mind telling you she was very pretty!”
    “Oh, a woman!”
    “Is it not always a woman?” Charles demanded.
    “Why should that concern Major Meredith?”
    “Only because she happened to be a brother Officers wife! He spoke at some length on ‘the Honour of the Regiment,’ our prestige in India and all that sort of thing!”
    “But is Major Meredith in our Regiment?” Orissa asked.
    The Royal Chiltern s had been the family Regiment of the Fanes and the Hobarts for generations. Son had followed father and grandfather until they all spoke of it with a possessive affection.
    “No—thank goodness!” Charles replied. “He is attached to the Bengal Lancers, but is always at Staff Headquarters. I wish he would stay there! If he had not been so blasted snoopy, neither he nor anyone else would have found out about my little escapade.”
    “What was that?”
    “Oh, a trip to the Hills when I thought we had