Короткий английский текст для практики чтения и перевода.
She had met him at a small place by the seaside where she was spending a month’s holiday with her mother. Doris was a secretary to a member of parliament. Guy was home on leave. They were staying at the same hotel, and he quickly told her all about himself. He was born in Sembulu1 where his father had served for thirty years, and on leaving school he had entered the same service. He was devoted to Malaysia.
“After all, England’s a foreign land to me,” he told her. “My home’s Sembulu.”
And now it was her home too. He asked her to marry him at the end of the month’s holiday. She had known he was going to, and had decided to refuse him. She was her widowed mother’s only child and she could not go so far away from her, but when the moment came she did not quite know what happened to her, she was carried off her feet by an unexpected emotion, and she accepted him. They had been settled now for four months in the little outstation of which he was in charge. She was very happy.
She told him once that she had quite made up her mind to refuse him.
“Are you sorry you didn’t?” he asked, with a merry smile in his twinkling blue eyes.
“I should have been a perfect fool if I had. What a bit of luck that fate or chance or whatever it was stepped in and took the matter entirely out of my hands!”
Now she heard Guy going down the steps to the bathroom. He was a noisy fellow. But he uttered an exclamation. He said two or three words in the local dialect and she could not understand. Then she heard someone speaking to him, not aloud, but in a whisper. Really it was too bad of people to talk to him when he was goin·g to have his bath. Now she heard another voice: it was a woman’s. And she heard him say: get out.
That at all events she understood, and then she heard him bolt the door.
From “The Force of Circumstance” by W S. Mauglzam
