In the same moment she heard Milly Armitage gasp. She herself did not seem to be breathing at all. Everything stopped while she looked at Anne. Then irrepressibly, incongruously, there zigzagged into her mind the thought, “Amory painted her better than that.” When this came back to her later it shocked her horribly. After more than three years of privation, suffering, and strain, who wouldn’t look different—older? A rush of feeling blotted out everything except the realization that this was Anne and she was alive. She ran forward with a half articulate cry, and Anne opened her arms. In a moment Lyndall was hugging her, saying her name over and over, the tears running down her cheeks.
“Anne—Anne—Anne! We thought you were dead!”
“I very nearly thought so myself.”
They came across the room together.
“Aunt Milly! How good to see you! Oh, how very, very good to be here!”
Milly Armitage was embraced. Struggling with a horrid rush of completely disorganized emotions, she kissed a cheek which was thinner and considerably more made-up than it had been three years ago. She couldn’t remember ever having been embraced by Anne before. A cool kiss on the cheek was as far as they had ever got or wanted to get. She stood back with a transient feeling of relief and endeavoured to find words. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of things to say, but even in this moment of shock she had a feeling that she had better not say them. Philip—she mustn’t say or do anything which would hurt Philip. A sense of immeasurable disaster hovered. Three and a half years was a long time to be dead. Anne had come back. Awful to come back and feel that you weren’t wanted any more. “The living close their ranks.” Who said that? It was true—you had to. Under this high-flown strain, something quite homely and commonplace. “Gosh! Why did she have to come back?”
Lyndall was saying, “Anne darling—oh, Anne darling! How lovely that you are alive!”
Mrs. Armitage remembered that she had been brought up to be a gentlewoman. With grim determination she set herself to behave like one.
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copyright © 1946 by Patricia Wentworth
cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4532-2546-2
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE MISS SILVER MYSTERIES
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The Key (The Miss Silver Mysteries Book 8) Page 26