Hester Waring's Marriage Read Online Free PDF

note that in the book,’ when a door behind the Board opened, and a man came in.
    Hester did not immediately recognise him. The newcomer was a picture of sartorial elegance. It was not only his beautifully cut suit—Hester remembered seeing such in the Warings’ better days—but he wore an embroidered waistcoat of a magnificence which she had seldom seen before. Pinky-mauve Chinese peonies rioted delicately across it. Its silver buttons were set with minute diamonds: yes, diamonds, her dazzled eyes told her, and he was carrying a beaver hat in the new style, and an ebony cane topped by a Chinese idol carved from ivory.
    He sat down and said in an elegant drawl, ‘Your pardon, Miss Waring, fellow Board members and Mr Jardine, but I was detained by the Governor, who asked me to send you his apologies for keeping me. But the matter discussed was urgent.’
    It was only when he turned his brilliant blue eyes full on her that Hester realised that this stunning vision, who was also the Governor’s friend, was her father’s ogre, Tom Dilhorne!
    She was so overset by this that she lost track of everything and sat, a picture of confusion, her mouth slightly open. It struck her that the reason she had seen so little of him in Sydney’s streets recently was not that he was missing from them, but that she had been looking for someone entirely unlike the man he now was.
    Tom, looking down on at her from his seat next to the Chairman, was seized with an enormous pity. If this was the best that she could do for such an important occasion, then she must be at an even lower ebb than Jardine had privately informed him. He also thought that he knew why she had gone such a hectic red, and then an ugly white when he came in, and he damned the dead Fred Waring,something which he was to do with increasing frequency in the coming months.
    Dismally aware that her performance, never very brilliant, was rapidly deteriorating into incoherence, Hester pulled back her shoulders and tried to recover herself. Godfrey Burrell asked her, foolishly, she thought, ‘And pray, Miss Waring, what are your scholastic attainments— I mean, in the more serious areas of learning?’
    As though, she thought disdainfully, I am going to be teaching the little ones Caesar and Livy, but her answer was polite. ‘I was taught by my brother’s tutor and I have a tolerable command of Latin and some Greek.’
    This statement, coolly made, seemed to impress all the Board except the ogre, who leaned forward and asked, ‘So you think that a knowledge of the classics will be useful to the youth of Sydney, Miss Waring?’
    â€˜That is the Board’s decision, not mine, Mr Dilhorne,’ she retorted. ‘Should they wish me to ground them in amo , amas , so be it!’
    This show of spirit appeared to amuse the monster. ‘And figuring, Miss Waring? How do you stand on figuring?’
    â€˜I can calculate a percentage as well as any, Mr Dilhorne.’
    â€˜Ah, you would make a useful addition to my counting-house, then, Miss Waring,’ he returned smoothly. ‘Some of my clerks seem a little unsure about percentages.’
    â€˜I thought that I was being hired to teach small children, not your clerks,’ was Hester’s mutinous—and spirited—response to this sally.
    â€˜Indeed, but one likes to learn of competence, wherever one finds it, Miss Waring.’
    This exchange of discourtesies would have gone on longer had not Godfrey Burrell glared at them both and in the tone of one calling the meeting to order announcedrepressively, ‘About small children, Miss Waring, I hope that you believe in the old maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”.’
    Before she could stop herself, Hester, whose face had become increasingly animated as she sparred with the ogre, came out with what she immediately knew was the wrong answer. ‘Indeed, I do not believe in the rod, Mr