The Beloved Stranger - By Grace Livingston Hill Page 0,53

an old nurse of my mother’s used to say. For pity’s sake, forget those emeralds and go and put your flowers in water. Unless, perhaps, you’d rather Gemmie did it for you!” she added with an acrid chuckle.

“Oh no!” said Sherrill, quickly hugging her box in her arms, her cheeks flaming crimson. “Look, Auntie Pat. Aren’t they dear? And yours are dear, too. Almost as dear as yourself.”

There was a tremble in her voice as she stooped and kissed the old lady on the sweet silver waves of hair just above her brow, and then she hurried away laughing, a dewy look about her eyes.

It was so nice not to feel utterly forgotten and out of things, she told herself as she went to her room with her flowers. It was just like him and his thoughtfulness to do this tonight! This first night after that awful wedding that was not hers! Somehow as she took the pansies out one by one and breathed their sweetness, laid them against her cheek with their cool velvety touch, the weariness went out of her. It seemed to her as if by sending these blossoms he had made her understand that he knew this was a hard night and he was still standing by, although he could not be here, helping her through. She thought the joy that bubbled up in her heart was wholly gratitude.

“Pansies for thoughts!” she said to herself and smiled with heightened color. “Is that why he sent them? Forget-me-nots! Oh—!”

She rang for a great crystal bowl and arranged the flowers one at a time, resting on their bed of ferns, and she was not tired any longer. She had lost that sense of being something that was flung aside, unwanted.

She got herself quickly into a little blue frilly frock for dinner and fastened a few pansies at her breast, pale blue and white and black among the fluffy frills. She came down to find the old lady in gray chiffon with a sweetheart rose at her throat, and the bouquet otherwise intact in a crystal vase before her.

It was after all a happy little meal. The two had lost their sense of burden. They were just having a happy time together, getting nearer to each other than they ever had been before, and the hazy forms of a youth of the past dressed in the fashion of another day, and a youth of the present very much up to date standing in the shadows behind their chairs.

“I’ve been thinking of that question you asked me, why all this had to come to you,” said the old lady. “I wonder—! You know, it might have been that God has something very much better He was saving for you, and this was the only way He could make you wait for it!”

“I shall never marry anybody now, Aunt Pat, if that’s what you mean!” said Sherrill primly, though there was a smile on her lips.

“Hmm!” said Aunt Pat, smiling also.

“I could really never again trust a man enough to marry him!” reiterated Sherrill firmly, nestling her chin against the blue velvet cheek of the top pansy.

Aunt Pat replied in much the same tone that modern youth impudently use for saying “Oh yeah?”—still with a smile and a rising inflection—“Ye–es?”

“This man is just a friend. A stranger sent to help in time of need,” explained Sherrill to the tone in Aunt Pat’s voice.

“Hmmm!” said Aunt Pat. “It may be so!”

Chapter 12

Arla’s triumph was brief. She found Carter anything but a lover the next morning. He was surly and crabbed to her at breakfast, found fault with her attire and her makeup, told her her lips were too red for good taste, even went so far as to say that Miss Cameron never stained her fingernails. Arla felt as if she had been stabbed. She could scarcely finish her breakfast.

But because she had determined to make this marriage a success, she bore his criticism, even ignoring his reference to his other bride though the tears were not far away, and a smoldering fire burned in her eyes. Was this other girl to be held up to her as a paragon the rest of her days? Oh, he was cruel!

She studied his sullen face, his selfish lips, and saw these traits in him for the first time!

And she, by marrying him in that underhanded way, had forfeited a right to protest against such words. She could not flare out at him and tell