The Truant Spirit Read Online Free Page B

name?”
    “Sabina. Sabina Lamb.” He made no immediate comment, and she thought he had not heard her and repeated her name again.
    “A lamb being led to the slaughter, or a fairly complacent victim?” he said, but if he meant it as a joke she did not respond.
    “I’ve grown up with the idea,” she replied gently. “Only I wish sometimes he was stronger.”
    “An invalid as well as a roue?”
    “N-no,” she said doubtfully. “But I think his digestion is weak.”
    He grunted non-committally, and they sat there in silence with the engine of the car gently turning over, and Sabina said: “You know my name, but you haven’t told me yours.”
    “Haven’t I?” he answered absently. “It’s Brockman— I’m called Brock for short. We’d better be getting on or Bunny will have given me up. Are you warm enough?” he added as he saw
    her shiver.
    “Yes, thank you, but I’m a little damp,” she said; then fell asleep before they had covered the next couple of miles.
    CHAPTER TWO
    SHE awoke, feeling stiff and feverish, as the car slowed down through the village, and rubbed a circle on the misted window to look out.
    “Is this Truan?” she asked, gazing with surprise at the few dark cottages. She supposed there was a shop and a post-office, but there seemed to be no village street in the usual sense, and
    the little inn stood on a tiny square of grass and looked hardly big enough to house anyone but the landlord and his wife.
    “Is that the only inn?” Sabina asked, wondering what she should do on the morrow when she would have to leave the hospitality of the unknown governess’s roof.
    “Yes,” Brock replied. “And you wouldn’t have found a room there, either. Your sudden flight would have seemed inadvisable without making proper inquiries.”
    She felt reproved once more, but in her ignorance she had supposed all village inns welcomed the traveller with an ever open door. She had stayed very little in the country.
    The rectory stood alone on the edge of the moor, a long, sprawling house with a jutting wing so thickly covered with ivy that it was difficult to see the windows. The churchyard encroached upon the rough garden but there was no church.
    Sabina stood shivering in the wind while Brock took his suitcases from the back of the car, and stared at the graves so uncomfortably near the house.
    Brock observed the direction of her gaze and remarked with grim dryness:
    “Very salutary living close to the dead.”
    “Is it?” she replied with polite uncertainty, and he told her impatiently to ring the bell.
    “There are no ghosts here, but it looks as though Bunny has given me up and gone to bed,” he said.
    Sabina tugged at the iron handle in the porch and heard a bell echoing faintly somewhere at the back of the house. By now she would be unsurprised at however the day might end, but when presently the heavy door was opened and lamplight and the scent of burning wood came to meet her, she knew only that she was very tired, that shivers ran up and down her spine which had nothing to do with the silent graves outside, and that wherever she had found herself, a warm bed would be the greatest benison of all.
    A small, neat woman stood in the doorway, peering out. Even in the dim light, she had the authentic air of an old-fashioned governess, with her netted hair and high-necked bodice and pince-nez suspended from a button by a fine chain, but her voice, when she spoke, though precise, held a youthful eagerness.
    “Brock ... is that you?”
    She did not see Sabina, pressed against the wall of the porch, and as Brock gathered her up into a warm embrace, Sabina felt herself to be an intruder.
    “My dear boy, how glad I am to see you,” Bunny said, automatically patting her hair back into place. “I had almost given you up, and although there have been hot bottles in your bed all day, they must be cold now, and Tregenna has never been to mend that latch on your window.”
    “Dear Bunny,” Brock