Читать книгу Wintersmoon онлайн

10 страница из 136

The boy smiled.

"Yes," he said. "That must be my father and mother. I'm Tom Seddon."

Brun held out his hand.

"It's very exciting to me," he said, "to meet Rachel Seddon's son. It's a good omen for my happy return to London. You tell your father and mother when you see them that Felix Brun took this liberty with you, and that he is going to call if he may."

"My father's dead, sir," the boy answered. "He died before the war. But of course I know your name. When I was quite a kid I used to hear mother say that you knew more about European politics than anyone in Europe. At that time," he smiled delightfully, "I didn't know I was going into the Foreign Office, where as a matter of fact I am—the only thing I wanted was to play the Australians at cricket—so what mother said didn't mean as much to me as it ought to have done. But it means an awful lot now. You could tell me some things I most frightfully want to know."

The boy was so charming that little Brun was entirely captive. He had been so long away from England that he had a little forgotten how pleasant a pleasant Englishman can be. Young Seddon, with every turn of his head, every spoken word, every smile, brought back to Brun a world of memories. Here was something that he could find no where else in Europe. He had been, yes, surely he had been too long away.