Tangled Autumn & the Edge of Winter by Betty Neels

Tangled Autumn & the Edge of Winter by Betty Neels

Author:Betty Neels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488084775
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2002-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER NINE

THERE was no one at breakfast when Sappha went downstairs the next morning, and when Mrs Burns, who had popped her head round the door to enquire if she had all she wanted, volunteered the information that Antonia had had breakfast with her brother and gone off early because she was going to school in a friend’s car, Sappha’s doubts and fears came rushing back tenfold, especially when Mrs Burns went on to say that the master and his sister hadn’t been so gay for a long time. ‘Laughing and joking, they were,’ she chuckled, ‘all about a fur hat Miss Antonia’s set her heart on.’ There was a great deal more in the same vein, but Sappha, while contriving to look interested, wasn’t really listening. It would seem that Antonia hadn’t told Rolf about Andrew. She finished her breakfast without appetite and set about the rather slow business of getting the Baroness dressed, thinking what a pity it was that she had missed Rolf when he had gone to carry his mother downstairs, even though she would have been able to say nothing to him, but it would have been nice, she thought wistfully, just to have seen him. Perhaps Antonia intended to tell him when she got back from school. She stifled a sigh and started to strap on the Baroness’s caliper, preparatory to the morning exercises.

Sia arrived unexpectedly just before lunch, declared her intention of staying for the meal and spending an hour or so with her mother afterwards, and suggested that Sappha might like to go out directly the meal was over, an offer which Sappha was only too glad to accept—a long walk might help her think, besides there was something she had to do. If Andrew was in Dokkum he would be staying in one of the two hotels—probably De Posthoorn; she would go there and see him and make him see that the sensible thing to do would be to go back to London before anyone else knew that he was there. Probably he would be difficult, for Antonia had behaved very badly and he wasn’t a man to trifle with when it came to his own dignity. Fired by this decision, Sappha pulled on her raincoat, tied a scarf carelessly under her chin, snatched up her gloves, and made her way to the hotel.

There was no one in the warm welcoming hall, nor was there anyone in the little bar beyond, for it was that quiet hour after luncheon which occurs in most hotels. She opened the door of the coffee room and that was empty too; she was just about to explore more deeply into the passages behind the staircase when a man and a woman came down it, and they were speaking English, or at least, Sappha amended, they were Americans speaking English. The woman was middle-aged, well dressed and still pretty, the man—her husband, almost for certain her husband—was tall, thin and stooping. Sappha advanced upon them and began: ‘Excuse me…’

The man paused in front of her and smiled nicely.



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