Patricia Wentworth - Danger Point

There was a silence that went on, and on, and on. He looked at her at last and broke it.

“Does it hurt so much?”

She said, “Not now.” And then, “It feels as if it was all very far away and a long time ago – a little as if I really had died that night and all those things had happened in another life – as if I’d left them a long way behind-” Her voice faltered and stopped.

He leaned forward again.

“Am I one of the things you have left behind?”

She said, “I don’t know – that’s for you-”

All at once he was on his feet with her hands in his, pulling her up to face him.

“Why are we talking like this? I’ve told you I love you! It’s been hell, but it might be heaven. I don’t want to keep you safe – I’m not asking for a resident policeman’s job. I want you to love me – I want you to marry me. I want you to come and live at the Manor with me. I don’t want to talk about the past or think about the past any more. I want to know whether you love me. Do you? Do you ?”

Her voice trembled into laughter. It was the sweetest sound he had heard.

“I wondered when you were going ask me that.”

Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.

Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.