Danger Point by Patricia Wentworth Page A

she had to see, and turned and came away.
    When she reached her sitting-room she sat down on the couch and tried to steady herself. A kiss doesn’t mean very much. With some men it doesn’t mean anything at all. She mustn’t make a mountain out of a molehill or think that the world had come to an end because Dale kissed his cousin. No, she wouldn’t cheat herself either — it wasn’t a cousinly kiss. But she had hurt his feelings. He had brought her a present. She hadn’t liked it, and she had shown that she hadn’t liked it in front of Rafe and Alicia. After that, how easy for Alicia to play on the hurt, to use his old feeling for her and blow some spark of passion into a blaze. If she had been there to watch, she could not have been more sure of what had happened. She had a sense of justice as delicate as it was rare. It could divide between Dale’s fault and her own hurt. She must not cry, because Alicia would see that she had been crying — and she must not let Alicia see, because Alicia hated her. But Dale loved her. Dale had married her, not Alicia. Dale loved her… Her heart turned slowly over. Did he?
    Before she had time to answer that Rafe drifted in from the garden.
    “All alone, my sweet? Well, that’s my luck, isn’t it? I’ve actually missed Miss Cole. Quotation from topical song — ‘I miss my miss, and my miss misses me.’ I wonder if she does. Alternatively, ‘I kiss my miss, and my miss kisses me.’ ” He made an excruciating face. “A perfectly horrible thought! Do you think she would if I asked her — or rather if I didn’t ask her?” He dropped into a chair and declaimed melodiously:
    “ ‘Kisses that by night are stolen
    And by night given back again,
    These are love and these are rapture,
    These are joy and these are pain.’
    The poet Heine — my own translation. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about it, by all accounts. What do you suppose Miss Cole would say if I were to recite that to her?”
    “She’d think you were being clever — they all think you’re very clever in the village — and she’d say, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, Mr. Rafe.’ ”
    His glance flickered over her. She had a momentary disconcerted feeling that it showed him everything she most wished to hide. But then, after all, it didn’t really matter with Rafe. He took everything so lightly that it didn’t matter. He even gave her the feeling that what burdened her was too light and inconsiderable to matter to anyone. Everything went on the surface with Rafe. What the depths held, or whether there were any depths at all, she did not know.
    The flickering glance passed on, touching everything lightly and resting nowhere. Then it came back to her.
    “Would you have liked to do this room over for yourself — have everything new?”
    She looked at him doubtfully.
    “I don’t think so. It doesn’t belong to me.”
    She didn’t say what she had said to Aimée Mallam, “Dale wouldn’t like it.” And she didn’t say it, because there was no need to say it. Rafe’s question and her own answer were not on any practical plane, but purely speculative. And that was so well understood between them that Tanfield with its laws and customs irrevocable as those of the Medes and Persians, and Dale, who was their servant, did not come into it at all.
    The fleeting gaze was fixed now. It observed her attentively.
    “But wouldn’t you like to have a room which did belong to you?”
    She said again, “I don’t know—” And then, “I couldn’t — here.”
    “But you could have your own part in this room. You haven’t added anything, have you? Everyone who has had it has added something that was theirs. Why don’t you get it new curtains? These will fall to pieces some day.”
    She shook her head.
    “No — they’re just right with the room.”
    She saw him frown, and for a moment the likeness to Alicia Steyne was strong.
    “They are right because they are old — is that what you mean?