The Truant Spirit Read Online Free PDF

great deal of furniture and numerous little tables bearing framed snapshots of children; brass and copper and odd and often hideous pieces of china decorated the walls, and a great armoire of exquisite workmanship and proportions rubbed shoulders with a cheap cabinet from which the paint was peeling. It was an extraordinary room to Sabina’s eyes, accustomed to the stereotyped modernity of small hotels, and tired though she was, she longed to pry further into the shadows, and explore the dark corners filled with so many unusual things.
    Brock watched her as he warmed his back by the fire.
    “Does the room shock you?” he inquired with derisive amusement. “It’s hardly evidence of a collector’s taste, is it?”
    “Why should it shock me?” she asked simply. “I wouldn’t know about collectors’ tastes, anyway. I—I like it.”
    “So do I,” he agreed surprisingly. “Bunny occupies each room in the house in strict rotation when she’s alone, but her personal favourites are here.”
    “And it’s where they should be,” said Bunny briskly, coming into the room with two bowls of soup on a tray. “This is the heart of the house, and I don’t expect or need the approval of the young of today. I’m old-fashioned, and don’t mind who knows it.”
    “Sabina must be old-fashioned, too,” said Brock with his customary dryness. “She is a dutiful niece ready to be forced into marriage with an elderly roue at her aunt’s command.”
    Bunny’s quick eyes saw the suspicious brightness on Sabina’s lashes and she said reprovingly:
    “What nonsense are you talking? Here we both are snapping at the poor child, and whatever the reason for her presence here she looks fit to drop.”
    Sabina was at the stage of exhaustion when a few kind words would be her undoing, and Bunny hastily placed a bowl of soup on a stool beside her and bade her drink it at once.
    “I should explain,” Sabina began between scalding mouthfuls which made her eyes water in earnest, “I should try to explain why I’m here at all.”
    “The explanation, though hard to swallow, is very enlightening,” Brock said softly, and Bunny gave him a quick look.
    “Explanations can wait till the morning,” she said with firmness. “Miss Lamb has a temperature, if I’m not mistaken. I shall go and put a hot bottle in one of the beds at once. The room will be cold, as there’s only a fire lighted in yours, Brock, but it can’t he helped.”
    “She’d better have mine for tonight, then,” he said indifferently. “If she’s got a chill we don’t want her any worse by morning.”
    The governess compressed her lips, then nodded. “Perhaps that would be best,” she said, but it was clear that she considered the intrusion most unfortunate. It was not for a strange young girl she had prepared with loving care the room which no one but Brock ever used.
    Sabina tried to protest, but they took no notice of her, and Brock observed with his twisted smile:
    “You needn’t think we’re being unselfish, my dear; neither of us is anxious for a sick guest on our hands tomorrow.”
    “That wasn’t kind,” Bunny reproved. “Miss Lamb is my guest at any rate for tonight, and you should know better by now than to embarrass someone under your own roof.”
    But he looked unrepentant, and Sabina, following her hostess across the hall and up a flight of dark, slippery stairs, resolved that however she felt by the morning she would relieve them both of her presence as early as possible.
    Brock’s room, unlike the one downstairs, was high and uncluttered. The furniture was solid and masculine and the books, in a glass-fronted bookcase, well bound and selected with discrimination. The walls were hung with very fine photographs of mountain peaks and ranges. They lent an austere and strangely impersonal air to the room, as if the high places of the earth could have no part in the mundane affairs of man. Sabina suspected that Brock himself had supervised the