Air Ticket by Susan Barrie Page A

assimilate the message. And then, as he looked up at her at last—at her and not Liesel—her heart began to knock with strange uneasiness.
    “I’m afraid it’s bad news, Caro,” he told her.
    Caro felt the color deserting her face.
    “Not—it’s not ... Beverley?”
    His dark eyes were compassionate as they rested on her small heart-shaped and rather wan face.
    “Yes, I’m afraid so. She was involved in a car accident late last night!”
    Caro never afterward knew how she lived through those next few hours. She knew that Liesel’s efficiency displayed itself in obtaining a flight reservation for her to London, and that details of her journey were arranged for her. She knew only that Beverley had been badly injured and that she had to get to her as quickly as possible.
    Lucien had said at once, “I’ll come with you, darling! You won’t have to travel alone.”
    But some part of her brain had come alive at that, and she had told him at once that it was quite unnecessary. She even emphasized the fact that she didn’t want anyone to travel with her, and that she would prefer to be alone.
    “But you look so upset,” he protested, “and I don’t want you to travel alone. Caro, I can easily get someone to take over for me for a few days, and a good many of my appointments can be canceled—Liesel will see to that. And I want to be with you—”
    “But I don’t want you to be with me!” She wasn’t conscious of any deliberate intention or wish to hurt him. But he had shut her out all summer and now she almost felt he was a complete stranger, who still kept his love alive in his heart for his lovely first wife and had nothing real or worth having to offer her. “I really want to go alone,” she insisted.
    He looked at her as if he could not be absolutely certain that she me a nt what she said.
    “Oh, don’t you understand?” she finally succeeded in convincing him. “Beverley is my daughter—she’s all I’ve really got in the world! I want to go to her, and I want to go to her without anyone else with me! You’re just a stranger! ”
    “Very well,” he said, and turned quietly away and she went up to her room, where Frau Bauer was hastily packing her a suitcase.
    On the way to the airport Caro found speech extremely difficult, and Lucien seemed to have retreated into a shell since she had made her wishes clear to him.
    “I think I ought to have insisted on coming with you,” he told her just before they parted, and for once she looked at him and smiled wanly.
    “I’ll be quite all right, Lucien. I’m used to looking after myself.”
    “And if you can you’ll telephone me, won’t you, tonight? And you’ll write to me?”
    “Of course.”
    He put his arms around her and held her for a few moments so closely that she could feel the violent thumping of his heart, and he said shakily before he kissed her, “ Auf Wiedersehen, Liebling !”
    And then she was in the air, and the cream car was once more moving sedately away from the airport.
    On arrival in London Caro wasted no time in catching a train for Yorkshire, and once she left the train a hired car conveyed her the rest of the way. She drove straight to the hospital, where she met her son - in-law again for the first time since those bright spring days when he was concluding his honeymoon with Beverley. He looked so haggard that at first she thought the worst had happened, and that she was too late; but David had been up all night, beside himself with anxiety.
    “But tell me quickly—” Caro looked up at him as they met in the entrance to the hospital “—is she...? How is she...? Will she...?”
    “They don’t quite know—yet,” he answered. They were conducted to a small private waiting room, and he dropped his head in his hands as he sat facing her on a chair. “It wasn’t that it was such a very bad collision, but she got the full force of it, and she—we were hoping...”
    “You don’t mean,” Caro almost whispered, as