The Shadow of the Lynx (49 page)

“You! You’d hate it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it’s not… England. It’s a new country. It’s vigorous, perhaps rough, and things are done differently over there from the way they are here.”

“Why shouldn’t I be different for a change?”

“Why are you going?”

He looked at me intently and said: “You know why.”

“Oh no,” I protested.

“You couldn’t. Not because of … me!”

“You are determined to go. It seems the only thing I can do is to come too. I can’t lose you, you know.”

“There is your estate. What about Wakefield Park?”

“I can put a manager in. That’s simple. In fact I’ve already settled that little detail.”

“But you love Wakefield Park.”

There is something I love more. “

I could not meet his eyes. I felt ashameA The, for instance? ” I asked.

“But of course.”

I stood on the deck of the Brandon Star and watched the shores of England recede. I was going back. Once I had stood on the deck of a ship bound for the same destination and Stirling had stood beside me.

Now Stirling was in England and I had said goodbye to him, to Minta, to the baby, to Whiteladies; and another man stood beside me.

Stirling and I were two of a kind. We had often said it. But Franklyn was with me now and Minta was with Stirling. We had despised them, mocked them because they were not like us.

No, I thought. They had a power to love which we lacked. Minta had been ready to die for Stirling; Franklyn had given up his beloved lands to come to me. What was love? Had Stirling and I understood love such as that?

“Very soon you’ll see the last of England,” said Franklyn.

“Does that make you sad?”

I turned to look at him, seeing him afresh.

“Not as I thought it would,” I admitted.

“We’re going to a great country, a land of endless opportunities.”

We smiled at each other; and the love I saw in his eyes was a glow that warmed me. I knew then that I wanted to learn more of his sort of love—and Minta’s—that love which does not look for sensation or continual excitement, the love that is built not on the shifting sands of violent passion but on the steady rock of deep and abiding affection.

As the land slid away below the horizon, I believed that I might find it.

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Fontana is a leading paperback publisher of fiction and non-fiction, with authors ranging from Alistair Ma cLean Agatha Christie and Desmond Bagley to Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, from Gerald Durrell and Joy Adamson to the famous Modern Masters series. ;

In addition to a wide-ranging collection of internationally popular writers of fiction, Fontana also has an outstanding! reputation for history, natural history, military history,! psychology, psychiatry, politics, economics, religion antf^ the social sciences.

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