The Jade God by Alan Sullivan (snow like ashes series txt) 📕

had been in touch with strange things and people. That used to content him, but latterly he sometimes used to look desperate. As to money, we have always had enough to live quietly.”

“Do you think he had any premonitions of death?”

“No, I’m sure of that. Once he said that it was harder to live than die, so he expected to live a long time.”

“Was that after his last trip?”

“Yes.”

Derrick was silent for a moment. “Does Mrs. Millicent know that I’m working on this?” he asked presently.

She sent him a quick smile. “Yes, and she thinks it’s tremendously kind of you but that it can’t come to anything.”

“My sister knows, too, and can’t see the point, either.”

“She would feel that it is interfering with your work. I feel it, too, and it may prevent a splendid book from being written. Am I tremendously selfish?”

He looked at her steadily, and her eyes met his without flinching. She stood, tall, slim, and straight, with a proud carriage to her head and a broad serenity of brow. Imagination was in her face, the beauty of whose contour filled him with a sort of comforting satisfaction. It was firm but gentle, courageous but sweet. Her eyes were a little wistful, and charged with changing lights and shadows that he found infinitely appealing. She awakened both heart and spirit, and he knew she could awaken his soul. What would it be like to be cared for by such a girl? He felt that already there existed between them something more than friendship.

“Will you forgive me for putting you through such an inquisition?” he asked.

“There is nothing to forgive, and everything to thank you for.”

“I think you are very brave.”

“Brave! It is you who are brave. We have no claim, no reason why you should be involved in all this.”

“And yet,” he said thoughtfully, “I was involved before we two ever met.” He made a sudden impulsive gesture, but it was his eyes that spoke next.

She smiled gravely, and at that smile he knew that another voice had reached him from the unknown. It carried no mysterious threat; it was unburdened with tragedy; it emanated neither from wood nor stone nor a jade devil. It was part of the rest, but all grace and purity and joy; a whisper of life, not death. What sped between them then he could never tell, but some echo of that whisper must have reached Jean, for her glance, strange and lingering and perhaps prophetic, met his own for a memorable instant while the color climbed delicately to her smooth cheeks.

“You see,” she said softly, “unless I can think of myself as having shaken all this off, and laid the ghost of uncertainty and, yes, fear, I can never have any real future.”

He pressed her slim fingers. “Don’t worry about the future,” he whispered.

Edith was very cheerful on the way home. She had had a long talk with Mrs. Millicent, promised her Derrick’s last book, found they had mutual friends, and in general enjoyed herself. It was a relief to be with someone professedly practical. Also she was beginning to entertain a shrewd suspicion that her brother was rather more than interested in Jean and turned the conversation in that direction before long. She chatted away, swinging her stick and feeling more at peace with herself than for some time past.

“I don’t think they’ll stay there very long,” she hazarded. “It’s too lonely. Mrs. Millicent spoke of France for the summer and feels that Jean should have a change. It’s no place for a girl like that.”

“Oh!” said Derrick uncomfortably.

“From what I gathered she blames herself for having stayed there at all. It seems she wanted to move away altogether, but Jean wouldn’t have it. She’s worried about the child and says that she cannot shake the dreadful thing off, which isn’t a healthy state of affairs at that age. You two hit it off very well, Jack, from what I saw. You had a regular conference.”

He laughed. “Did we?”

“Didn’t you? You ought to know. I never realized fully before what a variety of interests you seem to demand. First you come into the country to write a novel⁠—and, by the way, you’ll notice I’ve said nothing about the novel recently⁠—then you switch off to a murder case, and I haven’t mentioned that either recently, and the latest development is a perfectly new young woman of undoubted charm, of whom I begin to have suspicions.”

“And of whom perhaps you won’t say anything at all,” he parried.

Edith nodded. “Nothing could arouse feminine intuition more than that remark. However, she’s awfully attractive.”

Derrick grinned. “Suppose we leave it at that.”

“All right, brother, but just in case my feminine intuition happens to be right, I wouldn’t take Miss Millicent too seriously.”

“You’re very oracular today, Edith. What is it?”

“Her mother practically said that she didn’t understand that girl, but did know that she still felt very strangely about her father’s death.”

“One can imagine that.”

“Yes, of course, but it works in a curious way on her mind. She imagines herself linked with it in some odd fashion and won’t think of marrying till the thing is cleared up, which, of course, it never will be now. She argues that she has her father’s blood and all that, and she may have inherited some kind of threat or danger or whatever it was that killed him. The very idea seems grotesque to me, but there you are.”

“What else did Mrs. Millicent say?”

“Very little more about Jean, and nothing of her husband, but she did talk about Perkins and Martin. I suppose she wanted to reassure me.”

“Anything new about them?”

“Nothing much. Perkins seems to have been just as invaluable to them as she is to me. You know, Jack, I’ve rather changed my mind about that woman.”

“In what way? Perkins hasn’t changed that I can see.”

“Not a fraction. She looks just as forbidding and severe and wet-blankety as ever, and that used to worry me more than you ever knew. Also I was