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

covered our tracks very successfully! But trust Meredith to be everywhere he is not wanted!”
    Thinking of those searching, grey eyes she had encountered on the stairs, Orissa could believe this to be true.
    “As a matter of fact I hate him,” Charles went on. “It is, I am confident, entirely due to him that Gerald Dewar shot himself!”
    Orissa turned her head sharply.
    “Shot himself?” she repeated. “But why?”
    “That is what I would like to know,” Charles replied almost savagely. “Gerald was my best friend. A nicer chap you could not imagine. But he got mixed up with a woman when he was on leave in Simla. Damned attractive she was, too!”
    “But why should Major Meredith interfere?” Orissa asked.
    “That is a question I wanted to ask him myself,” Charles replied, “but I could not pluck up courage. Anyway, Gerald shot himself and we were all told it was a regrettable accident. Not that I—for one—believed that!”
    “What can Major Meredith do about my ... coming here?” Orissa asked in a low voice.
    “Only make trouble because I have more or less promised to behave myself with regard to the fair sex,” Charles replied.
    He paused and added with a smile:
    “Only ‘more or less’! But that certainly does not permit me to entertain a woman in Army lodgings.”
    “Surely you can tell him I am your sister,” Orissa suggested.
    “Do you think that will make it any better?” Charles asked. “I should then have to explain that my sister had been thrown out of her home in the middle of the night and had nowhere to go.”
    His voice was angry as he went on:
    “I am damned if I will let anyone know the sort of condition my father is in now! He was greatly respected by everyone when he commanded the Regiment . You know that as well as I do.”
    “I remember how proud Mama always was of him,” Orissa said softly.
    “That is why Meredith can think what he likes,” Charles said firmly. “After all I am not the only officer who likes the company of the female sex. And if they run after me, even to the extent of coming here, how can I stop them?”
    “I am sure you would not!” Orissa exclaimed and they both laughed.
    Charles had always been gay and irresponsible, she thought, and it would be impossible for anyone—even Major Meredith—to expect him to live a monastic life however much he might preach propriety to him.
    As they sat laughing together, a stranger would have been unable to find any resemblance between brother and sister.
    The Fanes all through the centuries—and it was a very ancient family—had always been either very fair or very dark.
    The dark Fanes had first come into the family in the reign of Charles II when an ancestor had brought home from Cadiz a black-haired, magnolia-skinned Senorita, and their children had taken after her.
    Charles was a fair Fane with blue eyes and fair curly hair which, combined with handsome features, made him irresistible to women.
    Orissa on the other hand resembled her Spanish ancestress.
    She had long dark hair with blue lights in it which grew in a small widow’s peak on her oval forehead. Her eyes, were enormous and seemed at times, when she was worried or angry, almost purple in their depths. Her skin was like a magnolia blossom. She was also small-boned and had a grace that was almost indescribable.
    Anything that Orissa wore seemed to mould itself to her exquisite figure and to achieve an elegance which made other women in her company appear clumsy and overdressed.
    Now looking at her seated on the hearth-rug, her small head shining in the light from the flames and her skin almost dazzlingly white against the red of her gown, her brother said:
    “I have to do something about you, Orissa.”
    “I am waiting to hear your suggestions,” she answered.
    “We must have some relations.”
    “Not many,” Orissa replied, “and those there are, Papa—or rather ‘She’—has quarrelled with. They never come near us now.”
    “If