Flower for a Bride Read Free

you, haven’t I? Jay, too—she’s always let you have clothes when you wanted them, and she’s fond of you. We both are! And Jay is my only child!”
    “Of course, if there’s something I can do—I’ll certainly do it.”
    But Lois’s eyes were wide, and all at once they were a trifle wary. She didn’t like the way her aunt avoided looking directly at her, although she was so obviously upset. “But what is there I can do?” “You can go and see Dom Julyan and explain the whole thing to him. Get him to release her! You must, Lois, because I simply couldn’t do it, and Jay hasn’t the courage. It isn’t that she’s weak, but she knows how upset he’ll be!”
    CHAPTER TWO
    The afternoon sunlight was falling goldenly all about her, and the heat from it was still considerable, when Lois—with all her instincts strongly opposed to what she was doing—set off in a hired car for the Quinta de Valerira.
    She had a confused impression of color on either hand, and a white road that wound between forests of cork trees and sloping, terrace-like vineyards. There were cottages beside the way, with gardens full of brilliant blooms, and occasionally shady trees met overhead, and the road was a delight because it was temporarily deliciously cool, and rather like a green tunnel of gloom. Then they emerged again to see more pretentious houses crowning a sudden ridge, and they were delicately tinted, with green tiled roofs, and the gardens glimpsed behind curly wrought-iron gateways looked exquisite and orderly. And on one hand there were frequent glimpses of the sea, with white yachts rocking at anchor, and queer shapes rather like prehistoric monsters that were actually rocks littering the dazzling strips of white beach.
    It was all a little unreal and unbelievable to Lois, so newly out from England, and with memories of grey spring skies and slowly budding trees. To see so much prolific growth in a matter of hours after leaving those skies and that more hesitant growth behind was a little bewildering at first, but it would have been still more bewildering if she had been in a frame of mind to dwell upon the difference. As it was, she was so appalled by the task ahead of her that it occupied almost all her thoughts.
    She had made vigorous attempts to escape it, even at the risk of permanently alienating the affections of her closest relatives. To her aunt she had stated bluntly that in her opinion there was only one thing Jay could do, having promised to marry a man, and gone so far with her preparations to marry him, and that was to tell him herself that she had made a mistake. But the sight of Mrs. Fairchild’s face, growing colder every moment, had convinced her that her arguments found little favor in that quarter. Mrs. Fairchild was too besotted where her only daughter was concerned to do anything other than support her; and when at last Lois came face to face with her cousin again after many weeks it was only to live through an extremely unpleasant half-hour.
    Jay had been lounging in the one big chair the room contained and in order to put up a slight deception where the servants who had to wait on her were concerned she had been wearing an enchanting dressing-gown. But she had looked richly tanned and a little hostile, because of her enforced confinement, and as soon as she found out Lois’s reaction to the plan she and her mother had formed she had gone through every variety of mood to get her to change her mind.
    She had been humble and penitent, pleading and disconsolate almost in the same breath, and then had shown her claws a little because Lois could not conceal how shocked she was, and how little she understood the other’s approach to responsibilities. It was true they had grown up together—and Lois had always had a great affection for her cousin, whose looks she admired enormously, but there were some things one just didn’t do, according to the poor relation’s code. And beneath the undisguised