Tell Me My Fortune by Mary Burchell

to say when none of the others were by.
    She nodded in a casual, friendly way, and they went out together into the warm dusk.
    For the first few minutes they strolled in silence, each perhaps intending that the other should start the conversation. Then he said reflectively, almost softly, “I’d forgotten how beautiful she is.”
    “Forgotten!”
    “Oh, only in the final, sharpest sense. I had a clear picture of her in my mind, of course. But no mental recollection ever really supplies that final glow of colour or clarity of outline. It’s like having a beautiful lamp, without the light inside.”
    “Yes. I know what you mean. You’re still very much in love with her, aren’t you, Reid?”
    “Lord, yes! Sometimes I wish I weren’t. But there’ll never be any other girl for me.”
    “Even if you don’t get her?”
    “I shall get her, Leslie.”
    She held her breath for a moment and tried to steady the beating of her heart.
    “Was it something that happened this evening which makes you so sure of that, Reid?”
    He didn’t answer her at first, but seemed to follow his own thoughts on some rather dark path. Then his attention came back to her with a start and he said,
    “What did you say? Yes, of course. Everything that happened this evening. She isn’t for him, my sweet.”
    He was in his characteristic, half-mocking mood of self-confidence again. “And she knows it as well as I do. It won’t take so very much to make her think again.”
    “And what about Oliver?” Leslie enquired rather flatly.
    “Oliver?” Reid laughed suddenly and rather shamelessly. “Oh, he’s restive and possessive about you already. Did you see the way he looked when I kissed you?”
    “Yes. I did. And you ought to have been ashamed of yourself, Reid. It was taking things too far.”
    “Nonsense! Did he say so?”
    “He did, as a matter of fact.”
    Reid gave a shout of laughter. Triumphant laughter.
    “What did I tell you? Fate unkindly mixed up the characters in this little drama, and all we have to do is unmix them. Oliver is already wishing irritably that he had the right to protect you from my attentions.”
    “Reid!” She was half vexed, half amused. “That doesn’t alter the fact that he is, at this moment, very much in love with Caroline.”
    “Every man is in love with Caroline when he first knows her,” Reid declared carelessly. “Even your father felt romantic stirrings when she smiled at him.”
    Leslie’s reluctant laugh admitted the probable truth of that. But aloud she only said,
    “That would make her rather an uncomfortable person to be married to, I should have thought.”
    “Divine discomfort,” Reid countered easily. “But, allow me to say, a discomfort which I could tackle very much better than your Oliver.”
    “I suppose you are right.” She glanced at Reid in the faint evening light and, seeing the brilliant, wicked smile which he gave, she thought she could well imagine that he could manage even Caroline.
    “Reid,” she said almost timidly. “How—I mean, what—”
    “You mean what is the next move?” he prompted her airily. “Though you are rather too nice a girl to choose your wording to sound as though you’re scheming.”
    She pressed her lips together.
    “Well,” she said at last, “let’s be honest before everything. What is the next move?” And she paused to pick a withered flower-head from one of the rose bushes.
    “I think,” he said, pausing beside her, “that the next move is for you to become engaged to me.”
    She straightened up and looked at him.
    “What did you say?”
    “Just exactly what you thought I said, sweetheart. And don’t tell me that you don’t know what on earth I am talking about, because of course you do.”
    She was completely silent, all her protests and indignant denials dying on her lips.
    “You mean,” she said slowly at last, “that the shock of seeing you apparently belonging to someone else is all that is needed to make her