Air Ticket by Susan Barrie

knowing where you were? Do you?”
    She made a barely perceptible movement with her slight shoulders.
    “I don’t know. I can’t think what there was to prevent you.”
    “Can’t you?” She knew now that he was deeply disturbed, and his dark eyes were staring at her in shocked surprise. She stared back at him. She felt all at once that he and she were poles apart, and that it didn’t greatly matter. What was it Brian had said about everybody watching to see how soon she would crack...? She took a long nervous breath and felt his hands grasp her shoulders. “Caro, what’s the matter with you?”
    “Nothing,” she replied, “except that I’m not Barbara—unfortunately for you!” The breath caught in her throat for a moment before she went on, looking at him curiously, “Why did you marry me, Lucien? Apparently all your friends are asking themselves that question, and not one of them can think of a satisfactory answer! They’re all agreed you were so much in love with your first wife that no other woman could stand a chance of winning anything more than a kind of lukewarm affection from you.”
    She freed herself from his hands with a slight twist and stood back. She was very pale. “Lucien, I’d like to go back to England—for a time, at least.”
    He stood looking at her. “I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about tonight, Caro,” he told her at last. “The fact that I married you has nothing to do with my friends. So why do you allow them to discuss me in your conversations?”
    “I don’t—they find you so absorbing that they have to discuss you! And I’m tired of being compared with someone who meant so much to you that you’ve never got over her, and I wish I'd never met you, and I certainly wish I’d never married you! I don’t want to stay here any longer—I’m tired of being put aside for everything, from a telephone call to the whim of a patient.”
    “I think,” said Lucien quietly, “that you’ll be wise if you go to bed now, and we’ll discuss all this tomorrow.”
    “There’s nothing to discuss!”
    “Oh, yes, I think there is. But you’re terribly tired, and I think you ought to go to bed as soon as possible.”
    She put an unsteady hand up to her brow and pushed the short fringe out of her eyes.
    “I do feel tired,” she admitted, “and I will go to bed—but there’s nothing we’ve got to talk about tomorrow. I just want to go back to London!”
    She slipped from the room before he could say anything further, and for the first time she locked her door against him.
    In the morning she felt like someone who had indulged in hysteria and was calm again, but she was not really sorry for any of the things she had uttered the previous night. They had to be uttered sooner or later, and she no longer had any illusions about her marriage to Lucien. If she wanted to put u p with merely playing the part Brian had so aptly described—a hostess in Lucien’s house—then no doubt Lucien would overlook her outburst and they would go on as they had been all summer.
    When she entered the breakfast room he was standing before the window and looking out, and she took her place silently at the table.
    “Caro,” he began, “I’m not going to talk to you now about last night. We’ll wait until I’ve got more time — ”
    There was a knock on the door, and he turned impatiently, “Come in,” he said.
    Fraulein Neiger entered. He was about to ask her about the note Caro had so insistently stated she left on Liesel’s desk the afternoon before when he noticed that his secretary’s expression was not quite the calm, untroubled one he was accustomed to seeing at that hour of the morning. When she handed over a written message and he cast his eyes over it he knew at once the explanation for that unusual look.
    “A telegram,” Fraulein Neiger explained.
    Caro watched Lucien as he took in the details of the telegram, and began to wonder why it took him so long to