Читать книгу The Counterplot онлайн

73 страница из 75

“I know! Tunes ... it is very queer,” murmured Teresa.

It struck her with a stab of amusement that her tone of reverent sympathy was rather like Jollypot’s—always agog to encourage any expression of the pure and poetical spirit that she was sure was burning in every young male bosom.

“Yes, it was ... an extraordinary time—for all of us; but for you in the trenches! And all that death—I’ve often wondered about that; how did it strike you?”

“Oh, well, that was nothing new to me—I mean some people hadn’t realised till the War that there was such a thing; but my old Nanny died when I was nine—and then, there was my mother.”

He paused; and then in quite a different tone he said:

“Did it used to scare you stiff when you were a child if you heard the clock strike midnight?”

“Oh, yes—did it you?”

“Rather. And could you scare yourself stiff by staring at your own reflection in a mirror?”

“Oh, yes.”

They laughed.

But Teresa felt the presence of the angel Intimacy—a presence which, when it comes between a man and a woman, shuffles the dreams and, so it seems, causes the future to stir in its sleep.