Mayenga Farm Read Online Free PDF Page A

be one of my best customers," went on Mr. Morgan. "You might not guess it, but Kent is quite a reader."
    Rennie grimaced. "Books on farming and forestry, I suppose?"
    "Not always. His last order included a treatise on social economics, a thriller, two classic reprints and a best-selling novel. His taste in literature is as catholic as his view is broad."
    A paragon, in fact, thought Rennie; an annoying example of what a man might become if he had everything his own way. What a mercy that his type was rare in this world.
    The following week, only six days before Christmas, Rennie received a letter which put all else out of her mind. She read it twice, standing on the path in the hot sun, and was back at Castledene, in Surrey, packing her trunk in the dormitory and assuring Jacqueline Caton that she mustn't cry; although she was leaving school a whole term before Jackie they would be friends for ever. Jackie had burst into a fresh crescendo of sobs and flung her arms about Rennie.
    "Dearest, sweetest Rennie, life will be appalling without you. I shall die, I know I shall, without my Ren to banish my blues."
    Five minutes later the girl had collapsed with helpless merriment over a pink pantie leg peeping from the strapped trunk. Jackie, heartbreak or no, had ever an eye for the ludicrous.
    Rennie and the vivacious little dark girl had been friends from the age of twelve, when Rennie, after her mother’s first breakdown in health, had gone as a boarder to Castledene. Jackie, installed at the school since she was seven, owned no real home; her father's business took him abroad much of the time, and mostly his wife accompanied him. Till Rennie came to Castledene Jackie had passed the vacations in a Mayfair flat. Then everything changed. Each holiday she travelled to St. John's Wood with her darling Ren, and slept in one of the white twin beds in the room that looked out over a lawn with a flowering cherry in the middle. She danced about the Gaynor villa in delightful silk wraps and pyjamas. She bought foolish, expensive gifts for Rennie and her parents, hugged them impartially and declared them the "loveliest family ever." When she talked at school about "home" she meant the house in St. John’s Wood and Rennie’s delightful parents.
    But between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Rennie and Jacqueline Caton had met only rarely, and each time the volatile Jackie had been poised on the crest of a wave of girlish passion for some young man she hardly knew. The Kensington grandparents with whom she now lived for three parts of the year had strict ideas regarding a girl’s upbringing. To be honest, as Jackie was when it suited her, none of her "affairs" could ever have blossomed into a satisfying kind of love, but they helped to mitigate the boredom of existence with a starchy old couple who spelled danger into the most conventional situation which their effervescent grand-daughter might share with a man. So Jackie's affairs were, perforce, based almost entirely on her too-vivid imagination.
    A week after Mrs. Gaynor’s death, Jackie had come to St. John's Wood. By then, Rennie had reached a dry, dumb state of grief, and the other girl’s tears had grated unbearably. Jackie had so much; she could afford to cry for others. Later, Rennie had purposely withheld news of their departure from England till it was too late to arrange a meeting for goodbyes — Jackie was apt to wallow in emotional scenes — but since their arrival in the Transvaal several letters had passed between Mayenga and Kensington.
    And now, after a silence of three months, Jackie had written to ask if she and her mother might spend a few days with them at Christmas. It seemed too utterly fantastic to be true.
    Rennie ran indoors, found her father pulling on his riding boots in the hall, and waved the letter at him.
    "It’s from Jackie! Read it"
    "I can’t, my dear. I’ve left my glasses somewhere. What does she say?"
    "She wants to come for Christmas — she