Read Another Woman's House for Free Online

swiftly and precisely on the small machine in her bedroom. But the house was different. It was as if all the strength and sturdiness of old Phineas’ building had not yet summoned the power to resist the memory of murder—and of Alice.
    But that was comprehensible. Again Myra thought, it is still Alice’s house.
    She had not spoken to Richard, nor he to her. There was only the sound of their feet along the path, the shrill, faraway whistles of the peepers, the regular hum of an airplane distant in the evening sky.
    They entered the pines.
    â€œMind the branch. I’ll hold it back,” said Richard, and held the fragrant green boughs aside so she could enter the path. The house vanished. The soft dusk below the pine trees’ closed around them. The path was narrow. Myra walked ahead of Richard, along the slippery brown pine needles, intensely aware of the man who followed her, the scent of the cigarette he carried and the sound of his footsteps. The pine needles gave way to sand and they came out beside the rocks, rough and white. The water lay directly below, soft and clear, reflecting a pink glow from the lingering band of pink in the sky. They crossed the sandy strip of beach and stopped. The boathouse lay at the right; it was so quiet they could hear the water lapping evenly at the piles, and its soft slap and murmur against the boats.
    The distant shore of Long Island was gray; nearer were several small islands, faintly yellow with willows, but veiled, too, in the soft spring twilight. Far away the hum of the airplane diminished.
    â€œWe could be a thousand miles from New York,” said Richard suddenly, his hands in his pockets. “We could be on a different planet. Except it would have to have the same stars and the same moon and the same smell of spring and sea.”
    Tomorrow she would be in what was equivalent to a different planet. Actually, New York was scarcely an hour’s time distant, yet it might as well be in another world. She would visit Thorne house again; she would chat with Aunt Cornelia over the telephone. She would never live in Thorne House again; she would never again see Richard on the terms of the past months, daily, with the easy, friendly accustomedness of habit. There had been a warm domesticity about it—false, of course, but kind.
    It had been dangerous, too, but she had not perceived its danger. Well, this was the last time. When she left Thorne House the next day she left Richard Thorne too, forever. Even if he wished to he could not see her—not often, that is, not unselfconsciously. She could hear the little comments: “I saw Dick Thorne in town the other night. He was with that girl of Miss Cornelia’s—secretary, ward, whatever she is. Tim Lane’s sister.”
    Everyone knew Tim, of course. He’d spent most of his vacations at Thorne Hall all the time he was in school. It had been like a home to him, thanks to Richard (and Alice—she reminded herself—and Alice) then and later, while Myra and Miss Cornelia were caught by the war in England and Tim was in boot camp.
    She could hear the replies, too. “Really! I wonder—but of course Dick can’t marry.” “No. Too bad. But there’s no way out for him.”
    All of it kind, none of it malicious. But Richard would hear it and avoid her. Actually, Richard knew as well as Myra that if he dined with a woman in town too often or at all, if he talked more than a few moments to the same woman at a cocktail party—if in any possible way Dick Thorne showed any woman marked attention, such comment was inevitable. Up to then, so far as she knew, there had been no comment; where Cornelia Carmichael went Myra went; everyone, she thought, accepted that without question.
    Once she left Aunt Cornelia, once she went to live with Tim, it would be different.
    There was a scurry and rush of feet along the sand and a small Scotch terrier skidded to a stop at