Outrageous Fortune by Patricia Wentworth

year after Jim went out—one for her birthday, and one for Christmas—and two again the second year, and the third. In the fourth year he only wrote for Christmas. The pain of that missed birthday came across the three years interval and hurt her still. She had counted on her letter, and it hadn’t come. Her birthday was in June, so it was six months since Christmas, and it would be six months before it was Christmas again. Six months is a most frightfully long time when you are nineteen.
    In the fifth year there was no letter at all. On her birthday and on Christmas day Caroline read the old letters and tried to make believe that they had just come. It was not a very successful make-believe.
    In the sixth year there were still no letters.
    And then in the seventh year—this year—they began again. He had written at Christmas from New York.
    Caroline got out the letter and read it again. It was a very nice letter. She hugged herself a little over it. It began, as all his letters always had begun, “Darling Caroline”; and it was quite long. He had been in lots of exciting places. He had been building a bridge in Mexico, and he had been in Chile, and Peru, and up in wild places in the Andes. He had also been inventing something which he hoped would make his fortune. He was burnt pretty nearly as dark as an Indian. And he had become a pretty good shot, because you needed to be. He was hers, Jim. He always signed just like that—“Yours, Jim.”
    That was the Christmas letter. Caroline answered it at once. She told him she was living with Pansy Ann, and she told him just how dreary and lonely and neglected Hale Place was getting to look—weeds in the drive, and green mould on the pineapples at the entrance—“and if you don’t come home soon, Jim, the trees will meet across the drive, and the cedar and the copper beech will grow in at the west windows. There’s ivy across the glass already, and the wisteria is over the old schoolroom. Aren’t you ever coming home? I do so want you to come. Your loving Caroline.”
    She had always signed like that to Jim from the time that she wrote him her very first letter when she was seven years old and he had sent her a doll for her birthday. It had real hair, and brown eyes that opened and shut. Jim was sixteen. He loomed heroic to little Caroline. He could climb trees. He could swim two miles—as far as from Hazelbury West to Packham. He could make a swing. He could make a kite. He could swing you right up into the air over his head and hold you there. He wasn’t a grown-up. Grown-ups said, “Don’t—” and “You mustn’t!” Jim was just Jim. She was his loving Caroline.
    He wrote again in February. He was very hopeful about his invention. He couldn’t tell her about it, because it was all extremely confidential. Elmer Van Berg might be going to back it. If he did, the thing was made. He wrote at length about Elmer Van Berg, for whom he seemed to have a high admiration—“The bother is, he’s interested in too many things. He takes turns at them. Whilst he’s riding one, the others might as well be dead. Just as I thought I had brought my job off, his uncle, old Peter Van Berg, died and left him an extraordinary collection of jewels. Elmer’s too busy with them to have time for me and my affairs.” There was a lot more about the Van Bergs. Susie Van Berg was awfully pretty, and awfully kind. They were great friends.
    In March he wrote that the Van Bergs were coming to England for the summer—“Susie wants to go to Court in as many of old Peter Van Berg’s jewels as possible. There are some emeralds which beat the band. They are said to have belonged to Atahualpa, the last of the Incas. I shouldn’t mind having what they would fetch—you can’t launch an invention without capital. If this thing of mine can only get a start, it’s bound