Painted Wings Read online

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT had been almost inevitable that the weather was too good to last, and sure enough the heavens opened up one evening, and the rain simply poured down. It was after eight o'clock and Deryn had been hoping to get a particular picture done before nightfall, but the light was so bad already that it was" impossible I to work any longer and she gave up. Instead she curled herself up in the cottage's one remaining armchair, the other having been taken down to the summerhouse, and tried to interest herself in an old magazine she had found under the stairs. It had been so heavy and oppressive all day that it should have been no real surprise when it thundered, but she pulled a rueful face when a low, ominous rumbling rolled in over the valley, coming nearer very rapidly. If it once started to rain there was a danger that it would not easily let up again and she had a lot more work to do, preferably out side. It occurred to her suddenly, as she sat there, to wonder if the summerhouse was weatherproof or not. It seemed sound enough, and it was quite a sturdy structure as such buildings go, but it was not intended to be lived in and it was possible that the roof leaked. Or even that the walls let in the 18 weather. , '18 She tussled with her conscience for quite a while, 3 S as she listened to the fast approaching storm, but S I .58 decided at last that if Dominic Gregory needed shelter from the storm, he knew where to come, and anyway, it was his own fault he was living in such primitive conditions. The storm was well and truly under way before she noticed an ominous but soft bumping noise from the bedroom above, and looked up, frowning. It was a familiar sound and yet, at the moment, she could not for the life of her place it. It was when the rain increased and the storm was a lashing fury overhead that she" realised. There was ncf mistaking that now more rapid and heavy thud, thud now. She knew with awful certainty that the roof was leaking. In a moment she was out of her chair and running up the stairs, with no idea what she would do when she got up there, only to be arrested when she was no more than half way up by a loud and insistent banging on the back door which could not be ignored. Making a hasty decision, she turned herself round on the narrow stairs and, after a hasty and anxious glance upwards, ran down stairs again to answer the door. 'Come in!' she called as she ran, guessing the identity of the caller, and wondering whyhe had to choose now, of all times, to make the formal gesf're of knocking on the door. As she crossed the kitchen, the door opened sudchnlv in a wild bluster of wind and rain, and Hound burst into the room followed closely by his master. They were both incredibly wet and she reached instinctively for a kitchen towel from the rail and threw it to Dominic, who grinned his 59 thanks as he rubbed his soaking wet head with it. . 'You'd better get out of that wet jacket too,' she told him, skipping hastily out of the way when Hound decided to shake himself dry. 'Sorry about that,' his master apologised. 'That's why waited to be asked in. When that hound is "j wet he's soggy.' '' , 'Can I dry him too?' I 'He's all right.' He tossed the towel back to her. 'Thanks for the towel.' 'You're absolutely soaked, both of you.'' 'We are a bit damp.' He divested himself of his S. iacket and, at her instigation, hung it over the back j of a chair. 'Whew! That's quite a storm.' g 'Are you flooded out?'she asked, foreseeing prob g lems about finding them somewhere dry to sleep 3 that night if the summer house was uninhabitable. But he shook his head, grinning as if he had followed her thoughts and regretted having to deny it. jS 'I'm not,' he told her. 'But you probably will be i before very long if this keeps up.' He too glanced (I upwards at the ceiling where that soft thud, thud 'j. ding was getting heavier than ever. 'It sounds like f it's already started.' ' Deryn followed his gaze, realising vaguely that >