Fear by Night Read Online Free PDF

shoulders, and an old-fashioned net cap upon her neatly brushed grey hair. The tippet was fastened by an enormous brooch which displayed a bunch of flowers worked in hair of different shades, the whole enclosed by a massive border of plaited gold. The cap was trimmed with bunches of narrow ribbon in two shades of magenta. Between the cap and the brooch there jutted out Mrs. Halliday’s bristling eyebrows, her large bony nose, and her very determined chin. The eyebrows were grey and made a fierce slanting line above a pair of very shrewd grey eyes. The face was long and thin. She put out a bony hand with a handsome diamond ring and said,
    â€œHowdydo?”
    â€œIt’s Miss Vernon, Mother,” said Mr. Halliday. All at once he seemed nervous. He advanced a chair worked in pink and crimson cross-stitch, and was at once bidden to place it at a different angle.
    â€œAnd then you can go, my lad. Her and me’ll have our talk without you. Never knew two women yet as didn’t get on better without a man between ’em.” She spoke with a strong country accent, and ended with a chuckle. She had a row of large and even teeth which seemed, most surprisingly, to be all her own.
    When the door had closed upon Mr. Halliday, she turned a sharp look on Ann.
    â€œVernon?” she said. “And what’s your Christian name?”
    â€œAnn.”
    â€œJust plain Ann?”
    â€œJust plain Ann.”
    â€œAnd a good name too,” said Mrs. Halliday heartily. “My grandmother called three of her fourteen Ann afore she could get one of ’em to live. She was a terrible persevering woman. That’s a piece of her ’air in my brooch. The sprig of white heather, that’s ’ers. Her ’air went a beautiful white afore she died. Seems like mine’s going to ’ang on grey to the end.”
    Ann gazed enchanted at the brooch with its bunch of flowers.
    â€œAre they all relations?” she asked. “I mean relations’ hair. How thrilling!”
    â€œSome of ’ems in-laws,” said Mrs. Halliday. She unpinned the brooch and leaned forward with it. “That there buttercup, that was a bit of my mother’s ’air when she was a young girl. So bright’s a marigold—isn’t it? Prettiest girl anywhere within fifty mile, so they did say. I don’t remember ’er. And the little tiddy flower aside of ’er’s, that’s my sister Annie Jane what she died with. My father’s sister, what had a turn for poetry, wrote an ’ymn about it:
    â€˜The lovely h’infant and the mother
    Are gone,
    And we ’ave left no other.’
    Which it stands to reason we ’adn’t, my father not being a bigamist. But that’s the way with poetry. I can’t say as it did my Aunt Maria any good. A kind of a mousey woman, she was. That’s her ’air in the stalks—and about all it was fit for. A proper old maid, she was.”
    She replaced the brooch, fastened it with a snap, and said briskly,
    â€œWell, that’s not business. ’Ow old are you?”
    â€œTwenty-two,” said Ann.
    Mrs. Halliday nodded.
    â€œSixty years since I was twenty-two—sixty and a bit. Lemme see …” The bushy grey eyebrows drew together. “I’d been ten years in the same service. Between-maid first—they don’t send ’em out at twelve nowadays, but they did then, and we were a long family, five of me own mother’s not a-counting Annie Jane, and four that my father’s second wife brought with ’er from ’er first marriage, and another six that they went and ’ad to finish off with. Well, as I was telling you, when I was two-and-twenty, I was second ’ousemaid up at the ’All, and rare and pleased to be getting twenty-six pounds a year. As I says to the ’ussy as we’ve got now, ‘You don’t know when you’re well off,’ I says, ‘And if I’d