Tell Me My Fortune by Mary Burchell Page A

realize it’s you she wants?”
    “I was thinking a little of Oliver too,” he replied modestly. “How do you think he will take the news of your engagement to me?”
    “Oh!” For a moment she saw again Oliver’s disturbed, dissatisfied face as he warned her against allowing Reid too many liberties. “He’ll—I mean, he would just hate it.”
    “A healthy bit of hate,” remarked Reid in an amused tone.
    “Reid, sometimes you terrify me, with your ruthlessness about what you want and your confidence that you’re right!”
    “And you,” he said, laughing a little and putting his arm round her, “are much too timid for this job. Don’t endow other people with your own delicacies and scruples. You’re sweet, and I wouldn’t change you for the world. But can’t you see that Caroline and I are much more violent, ruthless, earthy creatures than you are?”
    “I wasn’t thinking of you and Caroline so much,” she said rather faintly. “I was thinking of Oliver.”
    “Well, then, Oliver, I suppose, is much more your own kind. Don’t you think you ought to rescue him from Caroline?” And he laughed softly and kissed the tip of her ear.
    She was completely still. So still that he drew her back lightly against him without any resistance on her part. For a few moments they were silent. Then he realized suddenly that she was crying. Not stormily, as she had wept the previous day, but quietly, with the tears slipping rather helplessly down her cheeks.
    “Leslie, don’t!” He was surprised, and a good deal dismayed, and on a sudden impulse he gathered her in his arms as though she were a child. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? I didn’t mean to tease you as far as that. What’s wrong?”
    She hid her face against his shoulder for a moment, and was understood to say that she hated herself.
    “Yourself? Oh, no!” he exclaimed in amused protest. “Really, that’s terribly illogical of you. You can hate me, if you like, or Caroline, or even Oliver. But not yourself. You’re much the nicest person in this set-up.”
    “Oh, I’m not!” She dried her eyes on the handkerchief he offered her, and gave a faint smile of protest. “I hardly know myself, ever since I learned that Oliver didn’t love me after all. I don’t seem to have any dignity or decency or proper standards at all. I couldn’t have believed that I’d even entertain the idea of faking an engagement with one man, to make myself more desirable to another. And yet, when you talk to me about it—”
    “I know—I’m a plausible scoundrel,” he said regretfully, and smiled at her.
    “No, you’re not.” To her own great astonishment, she put up her hand and just touched his cheek. “You’re bold and perhaps a bit ruthless and cruelly realistic. But I don’t think you’re a scoundrel. You honestly think you have the greater claim on Caroline, don’t you?”
    “Sure.” He was watching her rather closely.
    “I think I think so too.”
    “Come, that’s something.”
    “And I do honestly believe that, in the long run, I could probably make Oliver happier than she could. Though of course it’s terribly easy to deceive oneself over anything that matters so much.”
    “Terribly. But I’m sure you’re right there,” he said, smiling.
    She paused, as though unwilling to follow the line of argument further. But, characteristically, he cleared the next fence for her.
    “In fact,” he said, “you agree about the probability of its being generally desirable that I should marry Caroline, and Oliver should marry you, even if we argue from the highest motives. What really worries you is the idea of our achieving that by a bit of light-hearted deception.”
    “Light-hearted?” She looked at him with rather shadowed eyes, and queried the word a little reproachfully.
    “Certainly. Don’t you think you could rather enjoy being engaged to me on a purely temporary basis? If we do this thing at all, we may as well enjoy it.”
    “I