THE WHITE WOLF Read Online Free PDF Page B

the years of his childhood and the years of his youth. It took unending patience.
     
    He couldn't go to school. His lessons came from tutors. He couldn’t go |o college, but he read voraciously, systematically. In the end, violent exercise was forbidden. But became a slow, sure swimmer; a slow, well- balanced skater. He found that walking satisfied, and so he hunted—not that he loved to kill, but because a gun slung under his left arm was a comfortable thing and balanced one of the two remaining marks of his early affliction: the sideward, downward pull of his handsome head which compelled his broad right shoulder to slope. People did not notice that at first. What usually impressed them instantly was the hard solid nature of his body and his thick unruly hair which, although he was but twenty-six, was now cream white.
     
    Sara, again feeling the burn beneath her wrist watch, was relieved that David did not pursue the subject. She knew he would bring it up again when she least expected it; just as again he had referred to the man on Ninth Street. Tenacity in his search for explanations was characteristic of him.
     
    Her wrist throbbed. A dozen times in the privacy of her tiny room she had examined that tiny crescent. How did he place it there? Why? Was it branded by a wisp of hot wire he might have held? Or had he managed somehow to. paint a drop of add on the flesh? She knew only that the pain served constantly to remind her of him and of his eyes, which attracted even as they repelled. .
     
    Sara’s lower lip trembled. Emotions damned up for months in the reservoir of her self restraint spilled over. She sobbed and her body shook with the sobs. But there were still no tears when David, freeing a hand from the wheel, pulled her gently to him.
     
    She was quiet at dinner that night. She was quiet as she and Pierre sat in the library.
    Once the public room of the Fountain Head, the library, too, had for its central fixture a fireplace—but one that boasted ivory-painted elegance. Its narrow, classically carved mantel and fireboard were supported by slender fluted columns, each well worn midway from the base where travelers, lounging in chairs, had parked their feet in warm and solid comfort. Some of those feet, tradition said, were shod in the boots of Washington and Knox and Hamilton and Sullivan when, on cold winter nights, they mapped their campaign against Cornwallis.
     
    Pierre, pretending to read the Bulletin , a considerably less scandalous newspaper than the Herald which Manning Trent published each and every morning, peered over the masthead at Sara, sitting on a spindly love seat, the book on her lap open to a page she wasn’t reading.
     
    Pierre “would have remarked how pale she looked; remembered, just in time, that she was always pale, yet the suggestion was in her. face. It lay in the deepening shadows under her eyes; in the very restlessness of her body; in her attitude of listening for some far-off sound.
     
    She had anticipated any questions about the watch by showing it to Pierre at dinner.
    “Very pretty,” he’d said. “I always thought—”
     
    He didn’t finish what he’d begun. Sara knew he wouldn’t. Always considerate, he continued, instead: “—that a watch would look lovely on you, pet.”
     
    He had noticed that it was very plain; white gold without ornament or stone; just such a watch as a girl who had never liked jewelry would select. But—where in damnation did she get that idea?
     
    Her silence beginning to wear on him, he put his paper aside.
     
    “Book any, good?”
     
    She shrugged, her rising shoulders sending radiant ripples down along the soft clinging velvet of her blouse.
     
    “The usual thing,” she said with assumed cheerfulness. “Boy meets girl. . . .”
     
    She started to recite the plot, hoping to throw off the weight that was hourly becoming more burdensome. Pierre pretended to listen. Actually, he was proudly inspecting her inch by inch from