The Breaking Point
Daphne du Maurier
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 1844085759
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this collection of suspenseful tales in which fantasies, murderous dreams and half-forgotten worlds are exposed, Daphne du Maurier explores the boundaries of reality and imagination. Her characters are caught at those moments when the delicate link between reason and emotion has been stretched to the breaking point. Often chilling, sometimes poignant, these stories display the full range of Daphne du Maurier's considerable talent.
before. Brushes not cleaned, but lying clogged still on the messed palette. Room untouched. It really was the limit. He’d a good mind to retrieve the envelope from the kitchen table. It had been a mistake ever to have mentioned the holiday. He should have posted the money over the weekend, and enclosed a note saying he had gone to Scotland. Instead of which… this infuriating fit of the sulks, and neglect of her job. It was because she was a foreigner, of course. You just couldn’t trust them. They
West put her hand up to her eyes and felt the crêpe binder, and the layer upon layer of cotton-wool beneath. Patience would be rewarded at last. The days had passed into weeks since her operation, and she had lain there suffering no physical discomfort, but only the anonymity of darkness, a negative feeling that the world and the life around was passing her by. During the first few days there had been pain, mercifully allayed by drugs, and then the sharpness of this wore down, dissolved, and she
savored the waiting moment as delicious because of its uncertainty. He heard the door open wider behind him and a woman’s voice, foreign in intonation, ask, “What can I do for you?” Fenton took off his hat. The impulse was strong within him to say, “I have come to strangle you. You and your child. I bear you no malice whatever. It just happens that I am the instrument of fate sent for this purpose.” Instead, he smiled. The woman was pallid, like the child on the steps, with the same
forthwith that he was fitting every workman in his employment with gloves so that they should run no risk of contamination if the Rovlvula flower were in fact radioactive. “The people of Ronda can be proud,” said the newspaper, “that at least one citizen of this country has the welfare of the common man at heart. We take the opportunity of saluting Grandos.” And what of the Archduchess all this time? Had she been forgotten? One of the chalet attendants who escaped on the Night of the Big Knives
her knitting under her arm and shook it. “I’m glad to see you too, Barry,” she said. He looked about him, trying to take it all in, and then he said to her, “You must come and join us. We have a table here.” The woman shook her head. “I can’t do that,” she answered. “I can’t leave here until closing-time. That won’t be until about three a.m.” Barry stared at the notice above the door—Powder Room—and saw the dressing tables inside the room and the long mirrors. “You work here, Pinkie?” he