Dear Trustee by Mary Burchell

you told the story as though you wanted Laurie to be terribly to blame. As though it were a bitter, personal matter.”
    “It is a bitter, personal matter,” he said harshly. “The girl happened to be my sister.”

 
    CHAPTER III
    “ Y our sister?” Cecile’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she stared at Gregory Picton in indescribable dismay. “Your sister? Oh, how awful. But she must have been—I mean, it’s all so long ago—How old was she when this happened?”
    “She was twenty-three when she died,” he said slowly. “It was terribly young to die.”
    Cecile swallowed.
    “And you?” she asked, as though she could not help it. “How old were you?”
    “Just under twenty.”
    “She was much younger than her husband, I suppose?”
    “Oh, yes. That was partly why she adored him. And why she had no chance against an older, more sophisticated woman.”
    Cecile shut her eyes for a moment, and before her inner vision there rose the picture of her mother as she was now. Lovely still, but hard and unhappy and disillusioned.
    “I’m sorry,” she heard Gregory Picton say, and she opened her eyes and looked at him again through the tears which she felt she must not shed.
    “There was no way of telling the story gently.”
    “I know.” She put out her hand to him across the table, in the first friendly gesture she had felt like making to him. “You poor boy—you poor boy!”
    “Oh, Cecile—” He gave a surprised little laugh and took her hand. “Why be specially sorry for me?”
    “I’m sorry for you all,” she said simply. “But for anything like that to happen to you when you were so young ... It must have poisoned everything for a while ... killed all one’s—one’s joy.”
    “I suppose it did,” he agreed slowly. “I was very fond of her, you see. She was my only sister. And, oddly enough, I was very fond of him too. He was big and attractive and handsome, the natural centre of any circle. And he was very influential, of course,” he added drily.
    She bit her lip, knowing that he had used the last term advisedly, and that it contained oblique criticism of her mother. “Did this break him up too?” she enquired diffidently.
    “He went abroad almost immediately after the inquest. I never saw him again.”
    Nor did her mother, Cecile supposed. The man who was to have given her all she wanted, in exchange all she had thrown away, just went out of her life. No wonder she often looked bleak and disillusioned.
    Cecile drew a long sigh.
    “I’m not going to try to defend her,” she said at last. “It would be impertinent to do that to you, of all people. But because this has been forced upon us, as an issue between us, I have to mention the—the extenuating circumstances, if only to explain my own position.”
    He was rather discouragingly silent, but she forced herself to go on.
    “I do understand how you feel about your sister—please believe me. But try to understand how I feel about my mother, too. She did a dreadful thing, I know, but the result was beyond anything she could have foreseen.”
    “She took the risk of whatever followed in consequence of her action.”
    “Well, yes—of course. Insofar as any woman who takes away another woman’s man runs that risk. But she didn’t engineer the tragedy. It must have come as a crushing blow to her too.”
    “Are you asking me to pity your mother?” he enquired drily.
    “No,” Cecile said quietly. “I am asking you to understand that I have a right to pity her.”
    He stared down at the tablecloth without saying anything. And suddenly she leaned forward and spoke to him softly but urgently.
    “Gregory,” he looked up, startled by either her tone or her mode of address, “I’ve only just come into this story, remember. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know my mother was alive. Now I find her—a lonely, sad, disillusioned woman with a dreadful weight on her conscience. Do you really think I should be right to judge her