The Sword of Fate Read Free Page A

Greeks live, when an Arab in a rickety Ford, just in front of me, ignoring all the rules of highway procedure, swerved right across the road. In trying to avoid him my front wheel ran over a patch of grease. The bike skidded violently. The front wheel twisted, the handle-bars were jerked out of my grip and I found myself sailing through the air over them, head foremost, straight for the nearest lamp-post.
    I don’t actually remember hitting it or anything else at all until I came to. I was lying in a large cool room on a comfortable sofa; a wet ice-cold compress was bound tightly about my head and as I opened my eyes Daphnis was bending over me. Her lovely face was within six inches of mine, and as our eyes met, in that very first glance, I knew that, if only I had the courage and resolution to win her, here was the one woman who would prove the crown and glory of my life.

Chapter II
The Voice in the Night
    I’ve had quite a lot of love affairs; to be honest, more than my fair share. Perhaps the gods gave me certain qualities which are attractive to women as a sort of compensation for the evil that they did me when they sabotaged my career in the Diplomatic at its very beginning and made me an outcast with no profession and no home. The very fact of my enforced idleness during the two years before the war had led me into all sorts of amorous adventures in half a dozen European countries and in the Near East as well.
    I don’t want to sound a prig, but it isn’t good for a young man’s morals to have no background, nothing to do except to amuse himself and plenty of money to do it with. Mind you, I’m not suggesting for one moment that I regret those locust years. Each of my affairs taught me something, not only about women but about their nationalities and a score of other things of which I should know little except for them. All the same, this constant seeking of forgetfulness in the company of good-looking girls, to which I had more or less been driven by my loneliness, had certainly tended to make me rather blasé.
    That blasé attitude evaporated utterly the very instant that I set eyes on Daphnis. She was not just another potential mistress, like Léonie or Anita or Oonas, and to be honest I doubt if she would have won the prize in a beauty contest embodying all the young women that I had kissed since leaving England for the last time. Yet there was something breath-taking and compelling about her which stirred me more deeply than anything I had felt since my very first calf-love.
    What it was I couldn’t say. The curling ends of her dark hair hung forward a little over her shoulders as she leaned above me and her large, brown eyes, faintly flecked with tiny bits of gold, smiled down on me, while her lips parted and showed two rows of small, white even teeth. Her mouth had a little birthmark on the upper lip that just demanded to be kissed. But it wasn’t her hair, or her eyes, or her mouth, or the set of her head on her shoulders, or the warm olive hue of her skin. God knows what it was but before she spoke I knew that it was a case of love at first sight—a thing in which I had flatly refused to believe until then.
    “You’re feeling better, yes?” the vision spoke, and in English,guessing that, of course, to be my native tongue from the uniform that I was wearing.
    “Yes,” I muttered a little vaguely. “I think so; what happened?” And I raised a hand towards the wet bandages under which I had suddenly become conscious that I had the grandfather of all headaches.
    With a quick gesture she caught my hand in her small soft one and pressed it down again, as she shook her head.
    “No, no! You must not do that. Your head pains you, I expect, but that is natural. Luckily for you it proved harder than the iron lamp-post.”
    “Of course,” I smiled. “That fool of an Arab cut right across in front of me, and in trying to avoid him the bike skidded. How long have I been out?”
    “Out?” she repeated