The Matchmaker Read Free

it light,” answered Alda cheerfully, pushing open the gate. It had a rustic catch, and it stuck.
    When they tried to unlock the front door with the key produced by Alda, that stuck, too.
    “Here…” said Ronald, putting his shoulder to it. “Let me try….”
    “Meg, you may come out now,” said Louise in a low authoritative tone, beginning to unbuckle the strap round her sister’s middle. “You must be a very good girl, because mother and father will be busy looking at the house and they won’t want to be interrupted. Come along,” and she set Meg’s tiny boots of patched rubber down on the path (which was of gravel; there was nothing so pleasant as a firm path of large stones, that could steam after a light spring rain or hold the heat of a long summer day, at Pine Cottage).
    “Merciful heavens,” exclaimed Alda, as the door gave way with a wounded screech and Ronald fell into the black passage, “Are you all right, darling?”
    He answered rather shortly that everything was comparative and then, as Alda lit the lamp on a table, they all burst out laughing; Meg was especially pleased to do so and held her face up to the light, making loud ha-has with her eyes shut. A passage was now revealed which apparently ran slap through the house and out the other side through a back door. It was covered in worn oilcloth. The yellow walls glistened with damp and the air struck deathly cold.
    “B-o-r-l-e-y——” spelled Ronald, with a significant glance at his wife.
    “Borley Rectory, the Most Haunted House in England,” took up Jenny promptly. “It was always cold there because of the ghosts. Do you think this is haunted, Father? How super !”
    “Of course not, don’t be absurd.” Ronald put his hand on the shoulder of Louise, whose eyes suddenly looked very large. “Come along, let’s explore.”
    “What a howwid smell,” said Meg heartily, as Alda with some difficulty opened a door on the right.”
    “Look, darling, the living-room is rather small; I expect we shall live in the kitchen,” said Alda, withdrawing her head.
    “I should think so too; beastly little morgue. What’s this?” as they approached another door at the end of the long passage.
    “The kitchen. It isn’t too bad.”
    “Everything seems fairly clean,” he said, glancing suspiciously about him when they had succeeded in getting the door open.
    “And there’s a little boiler that heats the water, and the coal lives in a shed out here——”
    She hurried with the lamp from room to room, only pausing when held up by a door which stuck; demonstrating, explaining, throwing open cupboards and generally casting her own glow so successfully over Pine Cottage that her husband found himself in the familiar position of thinking that the place was not so bad after all. The children followed her, with their three heads of flaxen hair palely reflecting the warm gold of her own; all three had a water-fairy look, with pale grey or green eyes and lily skins, but Jenny’s hair had the darkest tint and her eyes the deepest colour.
    “Now let’s go upstairs,” said Alda, when they had inspected coal shed and larder and even ventured out into a small back garden overlooking the fields. “Now, the bedrooms really are the best part of the house.”
    It occurred to Ronald that this was as well, since, when damp and lack of sun and endless mud had done their work, his family would probably spend much of their time in bed. But he did not say so; the house was taken; the contract signed and stamped, and Alda and the children, in their own minds, already settled at Pine Cottage. If he put his foot down and insisted upon an upheaval, he would have to go to Germany in the following week leaving his family still unsettled for the winter, and he felt that he simply could not endure any fresh anxiety about them. They and he were so newly re-united, their shared happiness was still so sweet, that he could not cast a shadow over it by trying, perhaps