The Towers of Love Read Online Free Page B

feels?”
    â€œOf course not. She asked you for dinner, didn’t she?”
    â€œYes. Out of courtesy. Out of politeness. Because she knew my family would think it was awfully peculiar of her, and rude, if she didn’t.”
    â€œNow, that just is not true,” he said.
    â€œWell,” she said, smiling again, “it doesn’t make any difference, does it? As long as you’re glad I’m here, that’s all I care about. And I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad we’re both here—back at our rocks, back by our brook.”
    But suddenly he didn’t want to think any more about why he had come here, or about the woods, or about the days when they had been children, or about the rocks or the brook—except how they were going to get across it now, and get home. He was not sorry he had found her here, not sorry they had taken this walk. But meeting her like this was turning his homecoming into a different sort of thing, not at all what he had expected, or even wanted. She seemed to have come jabbing back into his life, making him remember things he had forgotten, asking him questions about things he had not thought about for years and to which he was not at all sure he knew the answers any more. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. It’ll be getting dark soon.” And he decided to leap, the way he used to, across the brook from one rock to another. He made it, and knew by the way he landed on the other side that he had made it, but the smooth soles of his shoes slipped for a terrifying moment on the rock’s surface, and he almost fell, almost slid with a splash into the icy water. But he had an edge of rock with both hands, and managed to pull himself upright on the other side. “Hugh?” she said. “Are you all right?” And he knew that she was thinking, as people always did when he tried a thing like that, of his leg, of his lameness.
    â€œFine,” he said easily. “How about you? Think you can make it?”
    â€œI’ll have to take off these damn’ shoes,” she said. Removing them, she handed them across the brook to him, and he placed them on the ground. “Now,” he said, “give me your hand.”
    He gave her both hands, leaning across the water towards her, and she reached for them and seized them tightly. Then, for a pendulous moment, the two of them were arched across the water, balanced, suspended like a bridge themselves above it. They tottered there, and she extended one stockinged foot towards the rock on the other side where he was standing. “I’ve got this tight skirt!” she cried. “Oh, I don’t think I can make it! Oh, I can’t !” But he had her by the hands and he pulled her, and she jumped, awkwardly, towards him and landed beside him on the rock with a little gasp. He held her tightly as she swayed, still unsteady, and helped her up the rock’s side to a flatter plane as suddenly, with a deep wrench of memory, he saw her again, tanned and long-legged and naked, leaping across the brook in the sunlight of an afternoon, her brown hair standing out in little peaks about her neck and shoulders, her body glistening with thousands of drops of water.
    Apparently something of the same sort of memory had swept her too, for she said nothing more as he helped her down from the rock, helped her into her shoes again, and started with her along the wooded path that led up the other side of the valley towards their houses.

Two
    As a little boy it had always struck him as queer that his family lived in a castle. Children, always more conventional than their elders, are true conformists, and the castle had embarrassed him. He had never seen why his house could not be a regular house, like everyone else’s house, and the fact that his mother and father seemed genuinely fond of the castle, and liked living there, had been incomprehensible to him for a long time.
    It