Through The Wall Read Online Free PDF

gentleman, I forget his name, but he was walking down Victoria Street with his wife—rather a lot of people about and the pavement crowded, so she got a step or two ahead of him, but talking all the time if you see what I mean. Well, presently he didn’t answer something she’d said, and she turned round and he wasn’t there, and from that day to this there wasn’t a word or whisper, or anyone who could say what had happened. Just vanished right there in Victoria Street in the middle of the afternoon. And she never even got to know whether she was a widow or not, poor thing.”
    “Oh, Mrs. Deane, don’t!”
    “Well, my dear, you can’t get away from it, such things do happen, and no good worrying or upsetting yourself. Never meet trouble half way—that’s what my poor husband used to say, and I daresay he was right, though, I usen’t to agree with him. Better be prepared for the worst, I used to tell him, and then if it turns out all right there’s no harm done.”
    It was half past ten before a taxi stopped at the door and Marian Brand got out. She had had to borrow the money to pay for it, because her bag was still somewhere under the wreckage. She thanked the driver, and he gave her his arm to help her out and up the steps, because now that it was all over she was stiff and aching from head to foot. Her key was in the lost bag, so she had to ring the bell. And then there was Mrs. Deane, opening the door on the chain in the manner of one who expects armed burglars, and Ina running down the stairs to push her aside.
    “Oh, Marian—where have you been? I thought something had happened. Oh!”
    The “Oh!” came as the door was shut and the passage light showed quite unmistakably that something really had happened. The dust and blood had been washed from Marian’s face, but there was a dark bruise on her forehead and a narrow line of strapping above it. There had been so little left of her hat that it had not been worth while to bring it away. The right-hand sleeve of her suit had been wrenched from the armhole, and the skirt was fit for nothing but a rag-bag.
    “Marian!”
    “Oh, Miss Brand!”
    The two horrified faces swam in a haze. Marian heard herself say,
    “It’s nothing, really. There was an accident—but I’m quite all right.”
    She groped her way to the foot of the stairs and sat down on the second step.
    Chapter 5
    Cyril Felton came home on the fourth day after the accident. Someone drew his attention to a paragraph in the evening paper, and he took the first train back. Not too pleased to discover that his wife and sister-in-law had gone to London for the day, but Mrs. Deane was in a chatty mood and more than willing to invite him to tea in her sitting-room and tell him all she knew. If it was impossible to regard him as a good husband, she did think him very handsome and romantic, and she derived considerable satisfaction from the fact that she had just done her hair in what her “Why be dowdy?” column called “a queenly style.” She began to get out her best tea-set.
    “I don’t know a thing, Mrs. Deane, except what I saw in the paper.”
    “Oh, Mr. Felton—fancy their not letting you know!”
    “Oh, well, I was moving about. They wouldn’t know where to write. But what’s happened? All I saw was three or four lines about Marian being in an accident just when she’d heard she had come in for some money.”
    “Yes, that’s right. That’s just how it was—on Tuesday. She came home with the clothes pretty well off her back, and a bruise on her forehead. It’s gone down nicely now, and you really wouldn’t notice it. Mrs. Felton was in a terrible way, but there wasn’t any real harm done, and they went off at ten o’clock this morning to do some shopping and to see their uncle’s lawyer—something about the house that was left. Down by the sea, it is, and Miss Brand wants to get Mrs. Felton there as soon as possible, the sea air being what they always say would do her