“You leave such drugs to the aristocracy, Walter,”
Garratt Skinner had chimed in. “Just a
taste if you like. But go gently.”
Sylvia had not been present. But she conjectured
the scene, and her conjecture was not far from the
truth. But why? she asked, and again fear took
hold of her. “What was to be gained?”
There were limits to Sylvia’s knowledge of the
under side of life. She did not guess.
She turned to her mirror and looked at herself.
Yes, she looked tired, she looked ill. But she
was not grateful for having the fact pointed out to
her. And while she still looked, she heard her
father’s voice calling her. She shivered,
as though her fear once more laid hold on her.
Then she locked the bottle of cocaine away in a drawer
and ran lightly down the stairs.
BOTH SIDES OF THE QUESTION
Chayne’s house stood high upon a slope of the
Sussex Downs. Built of stone two centuries ago,
it seemed gradually to have taken on the brown color
of the hill behind it, subduing itself to the general
scheme, even as birds and animals will do; so that
strangers who searched for it in the valley discovered
it by the upward swirl of smoke from its wide chimneys.
On its western side and just beneath the house, there
was a cleft in the downs through which the high road
ran and in the cleft the houses of a tiny village
clustered even as at the foot of some old castle in
Picardy. On the east the great ridge with its
shadow-holding hollows, its rounded gorse-strewn slopes
of grass, rolled away for ten miles and then dipped
suddenly to the banks of the River Arun. The house
faced the south, and from its high-terraced garden,
a great stretch of park and forest land was visible,
where amidst the green and russet of elm and beach,
a cluster of yews set here and there gave the illusion
of a black and empty space. Beyond the forest
land a lower ridge of hills rose up, and over that
ridge one saw the spires of Chichester and the level
flats of Selsea reaching to the sea.
Into this garden Chayne came on the next afternoon,
and as he walked along its paths alone he could almost
fancy that his dead father paced with the help of
his stick at his side, talking, as had been his wont,
of this or that improvement needed by the farms, pointing
out to him a meadow in the hollow beneath which might
soon be coming into the market, and always ending
up with the same plea.
“Isn’t it time, Hilary, that you married
and came home to look after it all yourself?”
