The Other Linding Girl Read Free Page A

sitting-room had been put at her disposal.
    “Do you like it?” Paula watched the older girl closely as she looked round.
    “Very much indeed,” Rachel assured her sincerely. “Would you like to help me unpack?”
    “Yes, please.” Paula spoke with alacrity. “And tell me about my other cousins.”
    So Rachel obligingly described Elizabeth and Hazel, and something of their life in Loriville.
    “It must be fun to have sisters.” Paula heaved an involuntary sigh. “It’s dull being only one. But Mummy says she won’t have any more. I’ve asked her several times.”
    “Have you?” Rachel smiled, but left that subject tactfully undeveloped. “How about any other cousins? Has your Uncle Nigel a family?”
    “Oh, no!” Paula seemed rather amused at that idea. “He isn’t married. He says marriage is for the very good or the very courageous, and he’s neither.”
    “I see.”
    “He’s taking you out to a party tonight,” Paula volunteered unexpectedly.
    “Really?” Rachel looked surprised. “I don’t know anything about this.”
    “No, Mummy arranged it. Daddy’s taking her, and Uncle Nigel is taking you,” the little girl explained. ‘You can wear that pretty dress.” And she approvingly indicated the one full evening dress which, at the last minute, Rachel had decided to include in her luggage.
    “Then it’s quite a grand affair?” Rachel still very much doubted if she were to be plunged immediately in such social activities.
    "It’s a ball for one of the big medical charities,” Paula explained knowledgeably. “Daddy won’t usually go to anything like that unless it’s for charity. He doesn’t like these things as much as Mummy does. Are you ready to come down now? I expect we’ll be having dinner early, if you’re all going out.”
    “Then I won’t change until later—if I really am going to a full-dress party,” said Rachel, sounding as sceptical as she felt.
    However, almost as soon as they stopped outside her room, Paula cried,
    “There’s Uncle Nigel! He’ll tell you all about it.”
    And, darting away from Rachel’s side, she flung herself with affectionate abandon upon a man who had just reached the top of the stairs.
    “Rachel’s here, Uncle Nigel! And she doesn’t quite believe she’s going to the ball. But she is, isn’t she?”
    “As surely as Cinderella did,” was the reassuring reply. And, as he turned to her, Rachel found herself smiling into a pair of bright, provocative dark eyes, not unlike Paula’s own.
    She was never able to decide—either then or afterwards —what it was about Nigel Seton which made one smile so easily in his company. At that first meeting—and in view of what he had said on the telephone—she supposed it was because he took life so lightly and carelessly. It was not until much later that she noticed the odd variance between the mocking gaiety of those eyes and the firm line of the mouth and jaw.
    What she did notice on that first occasion was that the hand which took hers was strong and purposeful. “Hello,” he said, “so you made the date all right. And now you can come to the ball. I hope you like the idea.”
    “I think it’s wonderful,” she told him sincerely. “But I had no notion that substitute secretaries came in for so much excitement.”
    ‘They don’t. It’s being Sir Everard's niece that does it,” he assured her. “Have you seen Hester yet?”
    “No.”
    “Then come down and meet her. She’s in the drawingroom— with Everard and Oliver Mayforth.”
    Rachel, looked enquiring, and it was Paula who explained,
    “Mr. Mayforth is assistant surgeon at Daddy’s Nursing Home.”
    “And ‘Daddy’s Nursing Home’ is merely the characteristically possessive way this family has of referring to anything relating to it in the smallest degree,” Nigel Seton amplified a trifle drily. “Daddy doesn’t actually own the place. He’s principal surgeon. The chief miracle- worker in the eyes of the patients,